Isn the pesticide industry simply responding to the demands of farmers and other pesticide user?
Much of agriculture’s current dependency came about because industry’s aggressive promotion of pesticides as ‘modern’ and ‘safe’ create demand. With European and North American markets approaching saturation, the pesticide industry is now promoting its products heavily to Third World farmers and governments. In its drive to expand global sales, the pesticide industry has sometimes been shockingly irresponsible. When government of industrialised countries banned some pesticides as too dangerous, the manufacturers simply ‘dumped’ the chemicals by exporting them to developing countries with less stringent regulations. Particularly atrocious were experiments carried out by Ciba-Geigy in 1975, in which chlordimeform (a carcinogen) was sprayed on Egyptian children in an effort to persuade the Egyptian government to register the pesticide! • If most pesticide poisoning cases are due to misuse or abuse by users, how can companies be blamed? The pesticide industry itself has most of the informa
