T. UNDERSTAND the pesticide problem, we have to examine the three principal aspects of pesticides: as chemical substances that move through the environment in specific ways and poison living things; as commodities, produced and sold for the sole purpose of making profit; and as the products of research, reflecting the state of the art and the system of beliefs of the researchers as well as the way that research is organized. .
Pesticides are big business. In 1973 some $1,344,000,000 worth of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, nematocides, and rodenticides were sold in the United States, representing a physical quantity of 1.3 billion pounds, or between one and two pounds per acre for the whole country. Production is controlled by perhaps eighty to a hundred primary manufacturers, including such giants as Shell Oil, Mobil, DuPont, Monsanto, Tenneco, Merck, Ciba-Geigy, American Cyanamid, and Union Carbide. Their products are then formulated (combined into multipesticide products with spreader, sticker, solvents, and so on) by about eighteen hundred companies, which market them to dealers or directly to consumers by mail order (by way of seed catalogs, for example).
It is expensive to develop a new pesticide. Hundreds or thousands of potential products are screened for each one that eventually enters the market and thence the biosphere. Research managers estimate that it costs $8 million to $10 million, spread out over five to ten years to develop a product. Once released, it competes with other products aimed at the same pests; if successful, it becomes a target for "me too" research by other companies, which look for ways around the patent or wait until the patent runs out.
This chapter was first published in The Pesticide Syndrome, edited by Linda Siskin (San Francisco: Earthworks Publications, Center for Rural Studies, 1979).
Since pesticides are commodities, they will be developed and produced only if they promise a good profit. Not only must they sell, but the rate of return must be at least as good as that from alternative corporate investments: improving production efficiency, bribing bureaucrats, intensifying sales efforts, renting a military junta, opening a car rental business,, or buying a seed company. To be competitive, a new pesticide must have an expected market of some $10 million to $12 million annually. This means that it must be directed at a major pest of a major crop or must be a broad-spectrum poison.
Any delay in the licensing of a product, or any demand for more complete testing of toxicity or environmental impact raises the costs and cuts into profit. Therefore the corporation is resistant to learning about the environmental impact, reluctant to allow tight licensing regulations, hostile to environmentalists, and skeptical of alternative approaches to pest control. It will express these attitudes in its public relations efforts, allocation of research funds, briefs before hearing boards, presentations at professional associations, and articles in trade journals.
The result of the search for ways to turn oil into commodities that farmers will buy is usually a broad-spectrum poison with the following major properties: 1. It must be a poison, toxic at the recommended rate of application. 2. It must be soluble in the spray materials at the levels that will be used. 3. It should be persistent enough to effect a kill, but as complaints about unintended impact became more common, there is an advantage to more toxic and less persistent materials.'
Pesticides have three important properties. First, they turn into something else. Either after being absorbed by organisms or in the soil, under the influence of light and bacteria, the original molecules are transformed. At first the disappearance of a pesticide was taken as evidence that it was no longer having an effect. But we now know that aldrin turns into dieldrin in the soil, and that after being absorbed by plants, some herbicides become mutagenic. Therefore evaluating the impact requires tracing the chemical transformation of the pesticide.
Second, they are toxic, and the broader the spectrum, the less predictable the scope of their toxicity. Further, there is a tremendous variation in the susceptibility of organisms to a pesticide according to species, stage of development, physiological state, and environment. Some effects are immediate and some show up only gradually or under
special circumstances. For instance, DDT is fat soluble and threfore accumulates in the fatty tissues of animals. The fats are broken down during critical stages (as when a fish emerges from the e,gg) and during starvation. At other times it is held isolated from vital organs acid is more or less tolerated.
Third, they move through the en'ironment, which itself is very vari-
able. Even over very short distances there are differences of soil temperature (20°C or more on hot, clear days), dry spots and moist spots, particles of sand and of decaying organic matter, and a tremendous diversity of chemicals. Each pesticide has its own pathway of movement: some dissolve in water and soak down into the soil or are washed off the fields by rain; some do not dissolve in water but adhere to soil particles and are wind blown. Some concentrate in plants. But in all cases they are distributed very unevenly, so in some places the concentration is a thousand times greater than the average, and in other places it may be almost totally absent.
To be effective, most pesticides must enter the bodies of the pests. Before and even after they die, the pests move around, often over long distances, and may be eaten by other organisms, who also move around. Therefore the impact of the pesticide on the ecosystem may be far removed from the place of application.
Farmers use the best methods of pest control available to them, but what determines what is available? The methods of pest control that have been used over the last three or four decades are the product of the combined research efforts of private industry, the Department of Agriculture, and the state universities. For private industry the direction of research is dictated by the goals of direct profitability, certainty, and breadth of market.
The public laboratories have quite a different assignment, yet until recently their research effort in pest control was not too different from that of the chemical industry. For one thing, the strategy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture has always been aimed at increasing the technological input into agriculture. Pesticides fit within that strategy. They seemed to work, and they accorded with the philosophy of shortrange pragmatism that dominates agricultural research. The entomology departments of the state universities worked cooperatively and shared a common culture with the chemical companies. This is a not an exposé of scandal: if one accepts the role of private enterprise in the economy and the commitment to a modern, capitalist, capital-intensive agriculture, this collaboration was quite natural. The public facili-
ties tested the pesticides produced by private manufacturers and used the fees charged to subsidize student fellowships; industry gave research grants to entomologists; extension agents echoed the recommendations of sales representatives. During most of the period in question, the bulk of pest control research and publications dealt with chemical control. So it is not surprising that we know a lot more about chemical than about biological control and that the pattern of our knowledge and ignorance reinforced the pesticide treadmill.
The USDA is not well known for self-criticism. It responded to Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring almost as angrily as the chemical industry: there is no evidence that the pesticides are harmful, and we knew it all along and are watching it closely, and if you never stood by when a farmer lost his crop to boll weevils who are you to talk, and we have the most productive agriculture in the world, so shut up.
When questions arise of possible harmful effects of pesticides, the defenders of the products always try to narrow the scope of the inquiry to their most immediate, direct, and measurable consequences and then downplay them. The critics of pesticides, on the other hand, urge that the ecosystem is strongly interconnected, highly variable, and vulnerable. Thus debates around environmental impact become debates on philosophy of nature: are things readily isolated or richly interacting? Is the average behavior of chemicals and organisms an adequate basis for decision making or must we be concerned with the unevenness of the world? Shall we "be realists" and stick to measurable costs and benefits, or shall we concern ourselves with all kinds of consequences of what we do? Gradually we see a confrontation of the world views of mechanistic reductionism and of dialectical materialism.
But confronted with the question, "If we can't use pesticides, what should we do?" the critics of pesticides have only very general answers. The potential of biological and integrated control of pests is recognized, but the detailed knowledge needed for immediate practice is lacking. It is not that integrated control is inherently more difficult, but rather that the past history of research, as created by economic interest and theoretical biases, has conspired to give a pattern of knowledge and ignorance that reinforces the continued concentration on the search for "magic bullets." Therefore the struggle to change agricultural technology is also a struggle to change the direction of research, a change that can be imposed on the industry only from the outside by the direct and indirect victims of pesticides in collaboration with dissident scientists.
