Pollution Prevention  


What is WWF doing about the problem?

Great Lakes Pesticides Project

Operation Burrowing Owl

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Table of Contents


        
Pesticides Reduction

Pesticides, unlike some synthetic chemicals, are deliberately introduced into the environment, especially in the context of modern intensive farming. They include herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides. Their use is on the increase, and they represent a serious threat to sustainable agriculture and biodiversity.

     Birds die from mistaking granular insecticide for grain. Farm-workers become ill from inhaling crop-spray, and in developing countries they frequently die; but such hazards of direct contact with pesticides are only the beginning. Pesticides are notorious both for wandering out of bounds and for sticking around too long. Carried in waterways, rain or wind, and in the fat of migratory species, they can travel thousands of kilometres, and wherever they go they are likely to leave some residue. (Traces of pesticide have been discovered in Antarctica, where they have never been used.) Persistent pesticides - typically, organochlorine compounds like DDT - have contaminated the soil, leached into groundwater, and found their way into the food chain. Their use is now severely restricted. But even among the "new generation" pesticides coming onto the market, many do persist and bioaccumulate, and many are suspected carcinogens and endocrine disruptors. Developing young exposed in the womb or through the mother's milk are particularly at risk.

Then there is the rapidly worsening problem of resistance. Pests develop immunity to specific substances. New pesticides are invented to combat this, and in a vicious circle resistance increases in line with them. The newer organophosphate insecticides are a case in point. These are fast-degrading, but so poisonous and unselective that they encourage resistance while destroying the insects' natural predators.

Use of pesticides is increasing and continues to inflict terrible damage. Seals in coastal areas have been found to have severely depressed immune systems. Around the North American Great Lakes, the drainage area for a vast agricultural region, bald eagles, lake trout, mink, and snapping turtles are among species exhibiting reproductive and endocrine problems. Although it is impossible to single out any one cause, there are signs that beluga whales in the heavily polluted St Lawrence estuary in Canada may be reproducing at less than a third of the rate of Arctic belugas, and there are instances of hermaphroditism.

Any threat to the world's biodiversity threatens us too. This is partly because we depend on a large number of species for the manufacture of medical drugs and other consumptive uses. Less directly, but more significantly, it is because what happens to other species could also happen to us. Nobody invents a pesticide compound with the intention of doing away with songbirds or whales. But we need to remember that pesticides are, by definition, toxic. They are designed to kill.

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