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id21
viewpoints Chemical cure - pesticides in developing countries The first of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals aims to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. To have any chance of achieving this, pesticides will be needed. However, potential benefits must outweigh the problems pesticides can cause. About 75 percent of the 1.2 billion people living on less than US$1 a day live and work in rural areas. In the short and medium-term, most of these people will continue to rely on farming for survival; farming represents their only chance to escape poverty. While poor people can grow many important crops without using pesticides - maize, sweet potatoes, rice and sorghum are examples - there are three significant problems: * the harvested yield is
often extremely low due to pest damage Other crops are difficult to grow at all without pesticides, particularly in tropical climates. Insects tend to thrive here because there are no hard winters to break their life cycles. Resulting crop losses contribute to hunger and malnutrition, which kill more than five million children annually. Pests also cost developing countries millions of dollars in national income. Anti-pesticide views are widespread. Some are from well-nourished middle class people who buy organic vegetables, but resort to pesticides if flies or wasps bother them. Nevertheless, concerns are rightly raised about the potential environmental and human health risks of pesticides. However, in many developing countries, as elsewhere, the sensible use of carefully selected pesticides may be a wise choice. For example, using insecticide-treated bed nets reduces malaria, and applying herbicides reduces the need for weeding where there are serious labour shortages. This does not necessarily lead to pesticide dependency, but is the successful use of cost-effective technology. While using pesticides carefully can be an important tactic for providing enough food for the world's poor people, they should not be regarded as the primary way to reduce damage from pests and diseases. Before the introduction of pesticides, farmers relied on a range of traditional methods, such as crop rotation, selecting plant varieties that grew well and resisted disease, removing infected plants and mixing different crops in the same field. Some of these methods have been forgotten or are no longer used; it is often easier to spray pesticides than to manage the farm environment by more natural methods, so pesticides are often applied unnecessarily, when there are cheaper or better ways to reduce damage. The value of biodiversity to farmers is also being realised. Natural predators and other beneficial insects can kill large numbers of pests, and biologically based pest control measures, such as fungal and viral diseases of insects, fit very well into a safe and integrated pest management (IPM) system. These IPM systems help farmers to grow profitable crops while reducing the need for pesticides. The DFID Crop Protection Programme has carried out research into 'softer' pest management techniques. Our work within this programme indicates the need for a three step approach to pest management, which is as relevant to developed countries as it is to developing countries. * habitat management; encouraging
predators, cultural controls, hygiene, resistant crop types, seed treatments
(if appropriate). In summary we propose that
pesticides should not be seen as all bad. Provided that pesticides are
part of a carefully managed strategy they can bring real benefits in
developing countries in the same way that they do in developed countries. Jerry Cooper, Hans
Dobson and Kerry Albright Jerry Cooper Tel +44 (0)1634
883729 April 2005 Sources 'Agricultural productivity
growth and poverty alleviation' Development Policy Review 19 (4), 449-466,
by X. Irz, L. Lin, C. Thirtle, and S. Wiggins, 2001
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