The world’s most widely used insecticides have contaminated the environment across the planet so pervasively that global food production is at risk, according to a comprehensive scientific assessment of the chemicals’ impacts, published yesterday.
The researchers compare their impact with that reported in Silent Spring, the landmark 1956 book by Rachel Carson that revealed the decimation of birds and insects by the blanket use of DDT and other pesticides and led to the modern environmental movement.
Billions of dollars’ worth of the potent and long-lasting neurotoxins are sold every year, but regulations have failed to prevent the poisoning of almost all habitats, the international team of scientists concluded in the most detailed study yet.
As a result, they say creatures essential to global food production — from bees to earthworms — are likely to be suffering grave harm, so the chemicals must be phased out.
The new assessment analyzed the risks associated with neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides that farmers spend US$2.6 billion a year buying.
Neonicotinoids are applied routinely rather than in response to pest attacks, but the study highlights the “striking” lack of evidence that this increases crop yields.
“The evidence is very clear. We are witnessing a threat to the productivity of our natural and farmed environment equivalent to that posed by organophosphates or DDT,” said Jean-Marc Bonmatin, of the National Center for Scientific Research in France, one of the 29 international researchers who conducted the four-year assessment.
“Far from protecting food production the use of neonicotinoid insecticides is threatening the very infrastructure which enables it,” he said.
He said the chemicals imperiled food supplies by harming bees and other pollinators, which fertilize about three-quarters of the world’s crops, and the organisms that create the healthy soils which the world’s food requires to grow.
“It is astonishing we have learned so little. After Silent Spring revealed the unfortunate side effects of those chemicals, there was a big backlash, but we seem to have gone back to exactly what we were doing in the 1950s,” said professor Dave Goulson of the University of Sussex, another member of the research team.
The report cites the chemicals as a key factor in the decline of bees, alongside the loss of flower-rich habitats. The insecticides harm bees’ ability to navigate and learn, damage their immune systems and cut colony growth. In worms, which have a critical role in the food chain through their aerating of soil, exposure to the chemicals affects their ability to tunnel.
Dragonflies, which eat mosquitoes, and other creatures that live in water are also suffering, with some studies showing that ditchwater has become so contaminated it can be used directly as a lice-control pesticide.
The report warned that loss of insects may be linked to major declines in the birds that feed on them, though it adds that eating just a few insecticide-treated seeds would kill birds directly.
“Overall, a compelling body of evidence has accumulated that clearly demonstrates that the wide-scale use of these persistent, water-soluble chemicals is having widespread, chronic impacts upon global biodiversity and is likely to be having major negative effects on ecosystem services such as pollination that are vital to food security,” the study concluded.
The report is being published in the Environmental Science and Pollution Research.
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