Criticisms About Pesticide Use

Recently there has been more complaints about how pesticides are used throughout the World with concerns about their presence in soils, in harvested produce and the possibility that various illnesses were caused by exposure to pesticides. The initial criticisms date back to Rachel Carson (1962) who was concerned about the impact of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides. This led to the establishing of the Rotterdam Convention about the movement of highly hazardous pesticides and established standards of information exchange, essentially to warn countries not to import these chemicals. A subsequent Stockholm convention considered the wider problem of persistent chemicals in the environment. Nevertheless, the agrochemical industry has continued to market a wide range of these pesticides. In the countries with a more temperate climate, the requirement of training those applying the pesticides, usually with tractor equipment and use of protective clothing, problems caused by using many pesticides have not been so evident compared with more tropical countries, using mostly manually carried and operated sprayers with little or no training on how or when pesticides should be applied.