By any measure volume used, hectares treated, or market value global pesticide use is large and still climbing (33). In 1995, world pesticide consumption reached 2.6 million metric tons of so-called active ingredients, the biologically active chemicals at the heart of commercial pesticide formulations, with a market value of US$38 billion (34). Roughly 85 percent of this consumption was used in agriculture (35).
About three quarters of pesticide use occurs in developed countries, mostly in North America, Western Europe, and Japan, where high pesticide application rates are common. In these regions, the pesticide market is dominated by herbicides, which tend to have lower acute, or immediate, toxicity than insecticides. In most developing nations, the situation is reversed, and insecticide use predominates, with a correspondingly higher level of acute risk. Although the volume of pesticides that developing countries use is small relative to that in developed countries, it is nonetheless substantial and is growing steadily. (See figures “Developed Countries Dominate Pesticide Use” and “Pesticide Use in Developing Countries is Growing Steadily,” below.) Pesticide use is particularly intense where such export crops as cotton, bananas, coffee, vegetables, and flowers predominate. (See “Box 2.2. Bittersweet Harvest: Pesticide Exposures in Latin America’s Flower Export Trade.”)
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Insecticides of choice in the developing world are often older, broad-spectrum compounds belonging to the organophosphate and carbamate classes chemical families noted for their acute toxicity. These products are popular partly because they are no longer under patent protection and thus are considerably cheaper than the newer, still-proprietary pesticides increasingly used in more developed countries. Organochlorine insecticides such as DDT, lindane, and toxaphene are still widely used in the developing world, although their danger to humans and animals is well known. Many developed countries have banned or severely restricted the most toxic of these compounds but continue to manufacture and sell them. Trade in restricted and banned pesticides is almost impossible to track, but customs records for shipments from the United States show that at least 108,000 metric tons of banned, restricted, or discontinued pesticides were exported from U.S. ports from 1992 to 1994 (36). (See Table “Trade in Restricted Pesticides,” below.) A critical policy issue is to determine how to remove these older pesticides from circulation and use. (See “Chapter 3. Improving Health Through Environmental Action.”)
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