The Origins of Pesticides

The first in a three-part series on pesticides

#1 The Origins of Pesticides 📜

#2 Can pesticides and health live together? 🚑

#3 Focus on endocrine disruptors ✨

#Episode 1

It’s impossible to not hear about pesticides, and knowing the details is important, as it’s a complicated topic. That’s why we’ve put together this series of articles: to make sense of all the information that’s out there, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and give our readers a solid overall view of the subject. So get ready to be the know-it-all next time someone mentions pesticides — you’re about to become an expert 🕵

Pesticides, tell me a little bit about yourselves

So long as we’re talking about a heavy topic like pesticides, might as well start off with a little Latin. No, come back! We promise it won’t be that bad. The word “pesticide” comes from pestis (#scourge) and carder (#kill). They’re around to kill certain living organisms in order to protect other living organisms, and are oftentimes used in agriculture.

The pesticide family is organized into 4 branches:

👉 Herbicides: these combat weeds, those which either kill or slow down the growth of other plants

👉 Insecticides: these eliminate insects or their larvae, which live off crops

👉 Fungicides: these eliminate parasitic fungi that can kill or slow down plant growth

👉 “The rest” (because you always need a category that takes in everything else): these include molluscicides, rodenticides, nematicides, bird repellants, which fight against snails, rodents, worms, and…birds :) This category can also include fumigants (look, no “-cide” in that one!) that disinfect soil.

Now that you’ve got an idea of who all is in the pesticide family, it’s time to look into their history. We’re going to get into their family tree, so that you see where they come from and how they got to be so common and emblematic of today’s agriculture.

The family tree

Pesticides are everywhere: in the water, the air, the ground, our food. They’re so common that a recent study noted that over 90% of the French population is inundated with organophosphates and pyrethroids (the two most common pesticides). It’s time to figure out how we got here.

Contrary to what you might have thought, pesticides aren’t a recent invention. Already around 1000 B.C., Homer was using sulphur as a fungicide to combat mushrooms. Across civilizations and across time, we have used various substances (copper, sulphur, mercury salts) to combat things which could prevent bountiful harvests.

But the real use of pesticides took off with progress in mineral chemistry. In the 19th century, fungicides were made of copper sulphate or mercury. Insecticides were made of copper arsenite or lead arsenate.

The 19th century also saw the first scientific studies on the use of chemical products in agriculture. Work on arsenicals was performed in 1867 with Paris green, an impure form of copper arsenite. In the United States, it was used against potato beetles (little beetle that looks like this 🐞 but not quite the same), and in 1900 it was so common that legislation was passed regarding its use — likely the first piece of legislation related to pesticides in the world. 📄

Time Moves On

Pesticides benefited greatly from developments in organic chemistry. In the 20th century, given rising demographic pressures and political instability, the question of how to produce food became paramount. At the time, the world population was around 1.6 billion, and scientists were already talking about the “peak” — they thought that the earth had reached its production limits.

That’s when specialized players started to appear in the pesticide business. Monsanto was founded in 1901, and BASF and Bayer were around by then as well. These industrial figures were, for the first time, able to produce molecules (#pesticides) that could be deployed on a large scale in order to increase harvest yields. War also led to rapidly advancing research on these products.

Just prior to World War I, the German chemist Fritz Haber discovered a method for cheaply producing large amounts of nitrogen that could then be used as a fertilizer. This helped to resolve a serious problem: how to increase agricultural yields and to ensure those yields. But Fritz Haber didn’t stop there. War led him and his team to begin developing much more toxic substances, like mustard gas. His research also led to industrial manufacturing of what would become a well-known pesticide: Zyklon B. It would be used during the 1930s in agriculture, and then, in the 1940s, in the gas chambers of the Shoah.

These were the same years that saw the development of Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — DDT, to its friends. This is an organochlorine product, synthesized in 1874, whose insecticidal properties were only discovered in the 1930s.

The Spread of Pesticides

At the end of the two world wars, nations were looking for ways to avoid similar conflicts, and hunger and food production were two extremely tricky subjects. A way had to be found to satisfy the nutritional needs of the entire planet. The developments that were applied to war were no longer needed for that purpose. And so they were redirected…toward agriculture. Arms factories were repurposed and scientific procedures that led to chemical weapons were redirected to producing massive quantities of pesticides.

Following World War II, DDT rapidly became the most widely used pesticide in the world, with success on the battlefield and on the farms, in fields and in houses, combatting insects and diseases (including malaria, typhus, and the bubonic plague). This was followed by an explosion in studies and research aimed at developing pesticides that responded to every possible need of the agricultural industry.

Pesticides became more complex in order to improve their efficiency, whether in terms of targeting a particular parasite or in terms of their functions. They began to incorporate a large number of additives, to the point where today there are roughly 100,000 different commercial products in the world, made from around 900 different active ingredients.

There are thus multiple facets to pesticides. On the one side, they were used as chemical weapons to destroy the environment and the lives of millions of people (Agent Orange, Zyklon B). On the other side, in the 1980s they were seen as a real miracle solution in the attempt to feed the planet.

At that time, there were even certain salespeople who would take shots of Roundup (Monsanto’s premiere product) in front of farmers to show them that they could have 100% confidence in the product. For the first time in history, pesticides became a normal part of commercial agriculture. From 1945 to 1985, it is estimated that our consumption of pesticides doubled every ten years. Pesticides took over at such a fast rate that today we refer to their regular use as 👉 “conventional agriculture” 👈

But after a few decades of solid returns, arable land is becoming ever more rare, and the consequences of pesticides on our health and the environment are being seen ever more clearly.

Toward a New Branch of the Family

In his book entitled “The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food”, Wayne Roberts underlined that “the road to junk food, rural poverty and agricultural pollution was paved with good intentions”. And indeed, if pesticides are so widespread today it’s also because they had undeniable advantages. Now that they’re showing their limits, it is the moment to write a new page in the history of food. Numerous pesticides are starting to be forbidden due to their various effects. It is time to find a new solution, and opt for a sustainable food production system that responds to our needs and those of future generations 🚀

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