Uses and Environmental Pollution of Biocides - Pesticides: Evaluation of Environmental Pollution - page 4

Development Goal (MDG) is to reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from
hunger by the year 2015. Pesticides have emerged as one of the most powerful tools to
secure the provision of food and protect it against the wide mosaic of pests that attack food
crops. Owing to their chemical nature, pesticides are biocides, which have the potential
for poisoning organisms other than the target insect, microorganism, or plant species that
should be controlled as has been mentioned in the Biocidal Products Directive 98/8/EC of
the European Parliament and Council. Pesticides used in agricultural production affect
environmental quality and human health. These external costs can amplify due to climate
change because pest pressure and optimal pesticide application rates vary with weather
and climate conditions.
Pesticides have tremendously benefited humanity but at the same time caused consider-
able negative effects on biodiversity, environment, food quality, and human health. This
is because the structure of pesticides and their mode of action and also application, espe-
cially the way they are used by farmers, have rendered them serious pollutants of the
environment in general. Some pesticides (organochlorine compounds) are classified as
persistent organic pollutants (POPs). POPs have the ability to volatilize and travel great
distances through the atmosphere to become deposited in remote regions, and also have
the ability to bioaccumulate and biomagnify, and can bioconcentrate up to 70,000 times
their original concentrations.
The occurrence of persistent organochlorine compounds in the environment is chang-
ing relatively slowly over a span of years; similar time trends are characteristic of contents
in fish, meat, eggs, and dairy products, which are the foods that make the greatest contri-
bution to the intake of organochlorine compounds (Watterson 1991).
The use of POPs is being phased out, and some are already banned, while others con-
tinue to be used. Following the discovery of pesticides' negative effects on all compart-
ments of life, usage patterns have changed dramatically, particularly in recent years with
the introduction of some alternative approaches to control pests, such as biopesticides.
It is clear that feeding the world without pesticide use remains elusive, “especially with
some 800 million undernourished” people in the world today; however, intensification in
agricultural production should be sustainable and should protect human health and the
environment as well. Therefore, sustainable agriculture is one of the greatest challenges
that the world faces now.
1.2 Pesticides: A Global View
1.2.1 History of Pesticides
The pesticides machinery has been rolling since the early 1940s when dichlorodiphenyltri-
chloroethane (DDT) was first introduced, bringing about a novel paradigm in man's fight
against pests and diseases. The pesticides machinery has continued producing its assorted
species of chemicals that secured food supply to meet people's demands; however, flaws
and drawbacks were part of that big syndrome that marked pesticide use. Reported epi-
sodes of pesticide-caused pollution and other perturbation were rather frequent, and most
were illustrated in the touchy somber topic, the Silent Spring written in the early 1960s
by the renowned environmentalist Rachel Carson. The impacts of pesticide use on man's
health and environment welfare constituted a major concern that shed some light on pesti-
cides machinery along with the drivers behind it. In this respect, the unforgettable events