The Usages of Pesticides Should Be Controlled in Field of Agriculture
Surely, it is everyone’s responsibility to think about the global food crisis that humanity
faces today. Due to the concerns about the increase in population in next decades which the
world population projected to reach approximately 10 billion people, farmers, governments, and
organizations use several strategies to deal with growing of world population and to ensure that
everyone can have access to food nowadays and in the future. Pesticides are one of these several
strategies that farmers and governments use to produce more food to feed everyone. Pesticides
are chemicals used in agriculture to destroy pests, weed species, small animals, and harmful
insects that affect crops and plants. Farmers use pesticides to mitigate the effects of these
harmful insects on their crops and provide more amount of productivity of their crops in case of
food security. Food security is defined as “when everyone, at any time, have physical, social, and
economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food
preferences for an active and healthy life” (World Food Summit 1996). However, despite the
usages of pesticides that increase the productivity of the crops in the case of food security,
pesticides negatively affect environmental issues such as plants, biodiversity and human’s health.
Otherwise, pesticides should be avoided as a solution to increase the productivity of the crops to
feed everyone.
Food security and feeding everyone become a serious issue that everyone is concern
about, but the way humans interact with this issue is not appropriate. Farmers and governments
use pesticides as one of the main solutions to increase the quality, production of crops, kill pests,
and keep their crops free from diseases; however, why farmers and governments should stop
using pesticides and other chemicals is that human’s health is more important than feeding them.
To explain, by using pesticides everyone may get food, but the quality of the food may not be as
good as appropriate to human’s health. Pesticides can negatively influence human’s health.
Besides, some people are more susceptible to the toxic impacts of pesticides than others, such as
infants, children, farmers and pesticide applicators. For example, Soffar illustrates that those
children whom their parents use pesticides in or near home have more chance to develop a mind
cancer (Soffar, 5-6). Children’s organisms and systems that detoxify harmful chemicals are in
progress and not well developed to prevent the negative effects of these chemical pesticides on
their body and health. According to World Health Organization, every year about 3 million cases
of pesticide poisoning and 220,000 deaths have been reported in the developing countries (Lah,
1). Due to the use of different pesticides on crops and a huge amount of them, the food people
eat made them poisonous and led them to death with long term diseases.
