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Ambossodor
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The Growing Crisis of
PESTICIDES
in
AGRICULTURE
The good earth is under siege. lts crops are being attacked by
increasing myriads of insects. Fighting back is
man.
His weap–
ons- a bristling arsenal of more than
50,000
commercial
chemicals. How did it happen? ls there
no
way out of this
unending strugg/e?
by
Eugene M . Walter and Dale
L.
Schurter
"CHEMICAL
warfare" is a fact of
life.
It
is,
today, man's last
arsenal against crop-destroying
insects.
These chemicals affect not only insects
but man himself. They affect everyone
- and that includes you. No matter
who you are or where you live, you con–
sume, in your food, pesticides originally
meant for insects. And you carry these
chemicals around in your body.
More than a billion pounds of pesti–
cides have already accumulated in the
earth's air, water, soil, living plants and
animals; and the amount grows daily.
What these poisons are doing to the
entire web of life - and to personal
health - is only beginning to be known.
But what is already known ought to tell
us that, unless we drastically change our
ways, we are heading for disaster.
Life Chain Threatened
The most common of the pesticides
are DDT and other chlorinated hydro–
carbons.
These are especially vicious pollu–
tants. They are very stable compounds
and are not easily broken down. And
because of their persistence, they cause
dangerous biological concentrations in
the food chain. They end up ultimately
io the human body. Here is what hap–
pens:
Ocean water, for example, contains