User:Wombatsaregreat/Environmental impact of pesticides

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Adding subsection on industrial pesticides, expanding on section “Agriculture and the environment”, add subsection on agribusiness and corporate agricultural practices regarding pesticides

Agriculture and the environment[edit]
Main article: Environmental impact of agriculture

After the end of World War II, the United States shifted from the wartime production of chemicals to synthetic agriculturally used pesticide creation, utilizing pyrethrum, rotenone, nicotine, sabadilla, and quassin as precursors to the expansive usage of pesticides in place today. Synthetic pesticides proved cheap and effective in killing insects, but garnered criticism from NGOs concerned about their effect on human health. In the years directly following World War II rose the creation and use of Aldrin (now banned in most countries), "dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane (DDT) in 1939, Dieldrin, βBenzene Hexachloride (BHC), 2,4- Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), Chlordane and Endrin". In 2016, the United States consumed 322 million pounds of pesticides banned in the EU, 26 million pounds of pesticides banned in Brazil and 40 million pounds of pesticides banned in China, with most of banned pesticides banned staying constant or increasing in the United States over the past 25 years according to studies.

Today, over 3.5 billion kilograms of synthetic pesticides are used for the world's agriculture in an over $45 billion industry. Current lead agrichemical producers include Syngenta (ChemChina), Bayer Crop Science, BASF, Dow AgroSciences, FMC, ADAMA, Nufarm, Corteva, Sumitomo Chemical, UPL, and Huapont Life Sciences. Bayer CropScience and its acquisition of Monsanto led it to record profits in 2019 of over $10 billion in sales, which herbicide shares growing by 22%, followed closely by Syngenta.

Activism

While dubbed economic and ecologically sound practices by suppliers, the effects of agricultural pesticides can include toxicity, bioaccumulation, persistence, and physiological responses in humans and wildlife, and several international NGOs have risen in response to the economic activities of these larger, transnational corporations, such as Pesticide Action Network. Historically, PAN’s efforts have targeted the Dirty Dozen, resulting in treaties and global environmental law banning persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as endosulfan, campaigns for Prior Informed Consent (PIC) for countries in the Global South for the right to know what hazardous and banned chemicals they are importing, resulting in the Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent which became law in 2004, and “shifting global aid away from pesticides” through community monitoring and serving as a watchdog for the World Bank policy failures, eventually co-authoring the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) and cementing agroecological knowledge and farming techniques are crucial to the future of agriculture.