view. IPM provides farmers with the most choices and recognizes that pesticides may
be effective in short-term or emergency situations, but maintains that they should be
a tool of last resort due to their many unintended effects on health and the environ-
ment. The challenge is to maximize their effectiveness when they do have to be used,
while reducing the risks of damage to human and environmental health as much as
possible.^10Misuse of PesticidesThe FAO reported the widespread misuse of pesticides in the Third World. These
unsafe practices were primarily associated with applicator exposure and the result of
poor application equipment, but also suggested that environmental damage, pesticide
waste, and excessive pesticide residues on foods were serious concerns. The FAO
stressed the need for minimum standards for the safe and efficient application of agri-
cultural chemicals and indicated that improvements in equipment quality and better
training for farmers/applicators would dramatically improve the situation.
Farmers and applicators generally do not have sufficient knowledge about the pesti-
cides or application techniques to use chemical technology safely. Many farmers believe
that high spray-carrier volumes, high pressures, and high application doses are the cor-
rect way to use pesticides. Application equipment is not maintained, nozzles are not
replaced, and hoses leak, resulting in environmental and applicator contamination.
Fifty percent of the pesticides applied in Pakistan were wasted due to poor applica-
tion equipment and inappropriate use. India has levels of pesticide residues in food
crops much higher than the world average, thus indicating incorrect use of agrochem-
icals. Thailand is reported to have little training on pesticide use and consequently
farmers give little attention to the proper use of pesticides. Indonesian farmers use
manual spray equipment in which 58 percent of the equipment leaks.^11An Ill-Fated Legislative EffortRigid laws exist concerning pesticide use in the United States, yet there are virtu-
ally no regulations for the exportation of banned or unregistered pesticides. Pesticide
manufacturers spend years and millions of dollars testing their products before ap-
proval and registration. When these pesticides are not approved, U.S. manufacturers
often export them to Third World countries with more lenient restrictions on pesti-
cide use. As a result, twenty-six pesticide ingredients banned from use in the United
States are exported to developing countries, and six of them are used in Mexico.^12
The problem is twofold: first, toxicity threatens U.S. consumers in the ‘‘circle-of-
poison’’ effect, in which unregistered or banned pesticides are exported to a develop-
ing country and sprayed on crops whose produce is then exported back to the United
States. The EPA ranks pesticide residues as one of the leading health problems in the
United States. A study conducted by the National Academy of Science estimated that
in the next seventy years, one million additional cases of cancer in the United States
will be caused by pesticide residues.^13224 | Pesticides