The environmental impact of agro-export production in developing countries remains an important research topic. The political economy-inspired literature on developing country agro-exports maintains that export crops are pesticide intensive – or, more generally, environmentally destructive – while local and national market crops are less pesticide intensive, or environmentally benign. If used t...

Toxaphene is a manufactured pesticide comprising a complex mixture of hundreds of chlorinated terpenes. After DDT was banned from use in the United States in 1972, toxaphene became the most popular substitute. Control of pests on cotton crops was the principal use of toxaphene in the United States, although the pesticide was used to control a variety of insects on a range of crops and to eradic...

Beekeepers who use honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) for crop pollination services, or have colonies making honey on or in close proximity to agricultural crops, are concerned about the reductions of colony foragers and ultimate weakening of their colonies. Pesticide exposure is a potential factor in the loss of foragers. During 2009-2010, we assessed changes in the field force populations of 9-10...

Decisions about pesticide application for pest control is an issue of major concern, but research on factors affecting decision making is limited. This study investigates jointness in farmers’ decision to apply pesticides in multiple crops and socio-economic determinants of pesticide use across crops using a survey of 2083 farms from 17 districts in Bangladesh applying a multivariate Tobit mode...

Accurate pesticide exposure estimation is integral to epidemiologic studies elucidating the role of pesticides in human health. Humans can be exposed to pesticides via residential proximity to agricultural pesticide applications (drift). We present an improved geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing method, the Landsat method, to estimate agricultural pesticide exposure through m...

The large-scale commercial cultivation of transgenic crops has undergone a steady increase since their introduction 10 years ago. Most of these crops bear introduced traits that are of agronomic importance, such as herbicide or insect resistance. These traits are likely to impact upon the use of pesticides on these crops, as well as the pesticide market as a whole. Organizations like USDA-ERS a...

Pesticides are widely used in agriculture mainly to increase crop yields to cater huge supply of food products for increasing world population as well as to protect crops from pests and control insect-borne diseases. Increased use of pesticides results in contamination of the environment and the excess accumulation of pesticide residues in food products, which has always been a matter of seriou...

Introduction The significant and multiple benefits that Genetically Engineered (GE) crops have generated, including increased yield and lower production costs due to reduced insecticide applications, have been well documented in the literature1-2. However, the impact of GE crops on farmers’ health due to the reduction of pesticide use has not been rigorously analyzed. While previous studies hav...

Decline in Pesticide Use by Canadian Farmers Farmers in Ontario are spraying smaller amounts of pesticides on their crops than in the past. From 1983 to 1993, pesticide use dropped by a dramatic 28.3%, according to the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA). By comparison, pesticide use in the United States fell 15% between 1982 and 1992. Under the Food Systems 2002 p...

BACKGROUND The State of California maintains a comprehensive Pesticide Use Reporting Database (CPUR). The California Department of Water Resources (CDWR) maps all crops in agricultural counties in California about once every 5 years. OBJECTIVE We integrated crop maps with CPUR to more accurately locate where pesticides are applied and evaluated the effects for exposure assessment. METHODS W...