How are pesticides helpful to people and the environment?

Answer 1

Pesticides are helpful to people because they:

• Control insects, weeds, and fungi that can hurt plants, thus resulting in higher yields for many agricultural and horticultural crops.
• Killing insects that can directly harm humans by biting or stinging them. Some people are highly allergic to insect stings and bites, and could die from a single sting/bite. In other cases, like bees or fire ants, a person can get so many stings/bites that even if he isn't allergic, he could die. Insecticides, if used properly, can decrease the chance of such stings and bites.
• Similarly, insecticides can control insects that can harm or kill livestock and pets.
• Killing insects that can cause indirect harm to humans and their livestock and pets. For example, as disease vectors. malaria was eradicated in the US (and most developed nations) by wiping out the Anopheles mosquito, which carries malaria and transmits it to humans when they bite us, with insecticides. Though less dramatic in their health effects on humans, many insects, like cockroaches and houseflies, can contaminate otherwise mostly sanitary households by tracking all kinds of filth and germs across your kitchen counters. Roaches get a deservedly bad rap. But houseflies are just as nasty, if not more so.

Pesticides are helpful to the environment because:

• Without pesticides, farmers would have to use more acreage to grow the same amount of food. This would mean clear-cutting forests to till that additional land.
• Sometimes, an invasive species of plant or animal gets loose (either by nature, or by human intervention) in an ecosystem that cannot survive such an invasion. This species can, through competition with and predation on native species, wipe out those native species and create a huge imbalance in the ecosystem. Careful use of pesticides can, in many cases, combat the spread of the invasive species, keeping the ecosystem in balance.

Of course, pesticides can also be harmful to humans and to the environment. That is why the government imposes laws on the use of pesticides. However, in most cases, the threat to humans and the environment is not nearly as bad as so-called environmentalists want you to believe. For example, DDT is often portrayed as evil incarnate by environmentalists. However, it has never been proven that DDT is directly harmful to humans, and it is only marginally harmful to a very few species of vertebrate animals. And remember what I said about wiping out malaria? DDT deserves the vast majority of the credit for that. Yet, to hear environmentalists talk, it's the most dangerous substance known to man (except, perhaps, carbon dioxide). And now it is banned in all the developed nations of the world (though, thankfully, it is still used is Africa, though not nearly as effectively as it could be if the developed nations weren't attaching strings to the food aid given to them). Other pesticides, especially herbicides, are, for all practical purposes, completely harmless to humans. Take Roundup (active ingredient glyphosate), probably the most commonly and widely used herbicide on the market. I could sit across a table from you, with jugs of Roundup on my side of the table and pots of coffee on your side, and I could match you cup for cup, and you would die from caffeine poisoning before I died from glyphosate poisoning.

Answer 2

pestcides are economical way of controlling pest. it very useful to farmers.