THE PESTICIDE CONTROVERSY
CHAPTER 2: THE PESTICIDE CONTROVERSY
What is the pesticide controversy?
Ma W a 95 a b a Na G a a H a . Fearful the British would poison him, Hitler made sure to only eat food after it was eaten by Margot and fourteen other girls serving as his official tasters.22 Hitler may have been evil but he was not stupid. He knew that poisons affect people differently, and knew that any food which harmed one girl might harm him (then pity what would happen to the cook!).
Every year we spray something akin to poison on our food, and use something akin to H system of making sure we are not harmed. The motives are polar opposites Hitler cared only for the preservation of his person, while we seek the safety of all humans. Whether they are synthetic pesticides a a a , a a three types of pests: insects, weeds, and pathogens (e.g., fungi and viruses). At some level they could poison us also. Many contain carcinogens, cause neurological disorders, and the like. Yet, our food seems safe to most people, and since 1992 cancer incidence rates have even fallen or remained the same,23 cancer death rates have fallen,24 and life expectancy in the U.S. has been steadily increasing.25
Can we be absolutely sure pesticides are used safely? Not entirely, but like Hitler (and according to movies, every Roman emperor, Catholic Pope, and Medieval king) we employ testers not in the form of humans, but animals. All pesticides must be approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where the pesticide under consideration is given to laboratory animals at different levels. The animals a time and used to gauge the threats to human health a pesticide may pose. The EPA then determines whether the pesticide should be allowed, and if it is, the specific instructions on how it should be applied.
Is it cruel to test pesticides on animals? It cer a , b on animals will cause us to harm humans a notion in which 90% of toxicologists agree.26 Pesticides decrease the cost of food, and make fruits and vegetables more affordable. Raise the price of these healthy foods and cancer rates and other health problems in humans will rise.27 Help the lab animals, and you harm some humans. Modern, democratic societies must make a tradeoff between harm to ab a a a a a a . I a , , a the overall harm to animals and humans as low as possible.
Hitler was willing to sacrifice fifteen girls to save himself. The modern world is willing to sacrifice a small number of laboratory animals to protect millions of humans. Moreover, the EPA continues to find ways to reduce testing on animals without sacrificing food safety, like recent developments in molecular and computational sciences, which can sometimes be substituted for animal experimentation.28
In June of 2013 The Wall Street Journal a ba , W A a B B Ea a Mostly Organic Diet? a enter on pesticides. It featured one person who answered
a a , a a answers describes the pesticide controversy nicely. One person argued in favor of organic foods under the belief that regulatory agencies do an inadequate job of protecting public health, and the other argued that conventional food is not only safe, but that the use of pesticides makes fruits and vegetables more affordable.
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Lu (Alex) Chensheng: Ma a he e icide f d i f d a e hi g fea beca e he le el fall ell bel fede al afe g ideli e a d h a e da ge B fede al g ideli e d ake i acc ha effec e ea ed exposure to low levels of chemicals might have on humans over time. And many pesticides were eventually banned or restricted by the federal government after years of use when they were discovered to be harmful to the environment or h a heal h. Janet H. Silverstein: Gi e he lack f da a h i g ha ga ic f d lead be e heal h, i ld be c e – productive to encourage people to adopt an organic diet if they end up buying less produce as a re l A f e icide exposure, the U.S. in 1996 established maximum permissible levels for pesticide residues in food to ensure food safety. Ma die ha e h ha e icide le el i c e i al d ce fall ell bel h e g ideli e .
The Wall Street Journal. J e 17, 2013. W ld A e ica Be Be e Off Ea i g a M l O ga ic Die ? R3.
The pesticide controversy boils down to whether the regulatory agencies are making wise decisions about how pesticides are used or whether we must take measures to protect ourselves. In the U.S., that agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and it is charged with permitting pesticides only when it does not present an unreasonable risk to man or the environment, while also taking into account its economic costs and benefits.29 The controversy is whether it fulfills this charge.
What are the benefits and harms of pesticide use?
Before delving into the regulation of pesticides we must develop a better appreciation of the benefits and potential harms of pesticides. The benefits are that they protect crops from damage by insects, weeds, and pathogens, allowing farmers to produce more food using the same amount of inputs. For consumers, this means greater availability of foods and lower prices.
Peanuts are one of the healthiest foods and are relatively inexpensive. If no pesticides were allowed peanut yields would fall by 78%; about one-third of this reduction is due to the absence of herbicides and two-thirds for insecticides and fungicides combined. As less peanuts are sold on the market, prices would be expected to rise by 150%. Rice is staple food for much of the world, and without pesticides yields would fall by 57%. If denied pesticides, the yield for some of our healthiest foods like apples, lettuce, tomatoes, and oranges would fall by more than 50% (all are U.S. numbers).30 These are the same fruits and vegetables experts keep telling us to eat in greater portions. Pesticides allow us to produce the same amount of food using less land, and makes it easier for farmers to employ no-tillage farming techniques where no plowing is performed, thereby reducing soil erosion and fertilizer runoff. Many of the genetically modified crops today are valued because of their resistance to pesticides, but we defer this issue to another chapter.
A Chinese cook recently demonstrated the potential harms of pesticides when he mistook a pesticide for a spice. One person died and twenty others were sickened.31 Pesticides per se are not poisons though. The First Law of Toxicology, established in the sixteenth century, is that it is the dose, not the chemical, that makes a poison.32 We are constantly exposed to natural pesticides in our daily life. After all, plants make their own pesticides to ward away pests, and we eat many of these plants.33
If exposed at unsafe dosages, pesticides can cause cancer and a variety of neurological disorders like Pa ki di ea e. To what extent has pesticide use over the last few decades harmed human health? The more we learn the more difficult it is to say. In the early eighties research concluded that pesticides played a very minor role in human health problems34 leading some to conclude that virtually nobody dies of cancer caused by pesticides.35 Since then we have learned how difficult it is to determine the impact of pesticides on health, given the variety of carcinogens we encounter
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(including charred meat,36 acrylamide in French fries and coffee,37 and household cleaning supplies38) and the long delay between exposure and health impacts. Scientists are fairly certain that about one- third of cancer is caused by smoking and another one-third is caused by diet, weight, and exercise, but the sources of the remaining third are difficult to assign.39
Of this other third of cancers, pesticide use certainly seems to play some role. Non-H dgki lymphoma, prostate cancer, melanoma, and a variety of other cancers are correlated with pesticide use. People applying pesticides, living on farms, or employed in pesticide manufacturing seem to have higher cancer rates than their counterparts who rarely encounter pesticides.40
The issue becomes even more complex when one considers the many indirect ways pesticides affect humans. Honeybee colonies have reduced dramatically in recent years in something called the Colony Collapse Disorder, and though he ca e i ce ai , e icide c d be a b a e.41 Since we rely on bees to pollinate much of our fruits and vegetables, this indirect effect could negate any direct benefits of certain pesticides.
There is little controversy over whether pesticides may pose a potential harm. What is questionable is whether actual harms are observable, and if they are, whether the benefits of pesticides outweigh those health harms. For instance, a pesticide may directly increase cancer rates slightly, but indirectly cause a larger reduction in cancer rates by reducing substantially the price of fruits and vegetables. When the Mayo Clinic listed seven tips to reducing risk of cancer, the first tip was to abstain from tobacco and the second was to eat a healthy diet, which was described as lots of fruits and vegetables, a limited amount of fat, and avoiding too much alcohol. Avoiding foods produced using pesticides was not even on the list.42
Now that we recognize this trade-off between pesticide harms and benefits we turn to the regulation of pesticides in western democracies, focusing mostly on the U.S. regulatory system. While the legal framework for regulating pesticides differs in western Europe, the methods, challenges, and goals are very similar. Much of what is said about the EPA can be extrapolated to the EU and the UK.43
How are pesticides regulated?
It is not unusual to hear about salespeople in the early days of synthetic pesticides (1940s) who would drink the chemical to prove its safety. One always suspects the salesmen were playing a ruse, but it is a testimony to how safe people once considered pesticides. The pesticide DDT was called a
a i f a ki d d i g W d Wa II, as it was the first war where more people died of casualties than disease. Farmers began using DDT on a large-scale and governments would spray…
