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Agricultural Chemicals in Relation to Environmental Quality: Insecticides Today and Tomorrow¹

ABSTRACT

Insecticides are used in agriculture as purposeful environmental contaminants to increase cost/benefit ratio in favor of the farmer and the citizen as consumer of food and fiber. However, their use has become a focal point in public concern for the preservation of environmental quality. Insecticides are widely estimated to have returned an average of about $5 to the farmer for every $1 expended. They have become an essential part of farm technology and their use is the inevitable consequences of the monoculture approach to modern high production agriculture. As ever increasing quantities of a widening variety of organic chemicals are used for pest control, the problems of environmental micropollution became intensified. There is an urgent need to learn much more about the environmental distribution and fate of not only the newer insecticides but also of the older materials still widely used.

Pesticides of all kinds will be widely used for the forseeable future. However, newer selective and biodegradable compounds must replace the older highly toxic and persistent chemicals. Pest management programs directed by pest control specialists will make pest control an integral part of crop production and will reduce the extent of environmental pollution by pesticides. Prescription sale and supervision of pesticides use will provide the best way to prevent the misuse and abuse of pesticides.

¹ Paper presented Dec. 28–29, 1970, in Chicago, Ill. at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section "O" Agriculture Symposium on "Agriculture and the Quality of the Environment in the Seventies."

² Professor of Zoology and Entomology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 61801.