Trends in pesticide use – cause for hope

Yet there are grounds for optimism. For example, in the Philippines, farmers in the above-mentioned survey applied by far the lowest levels of insecticides in any of the areas surveyed. The next lowest users, farmers in Tamil Nadu, India, used 60% more insecticides than the Filipinos. The highest users were farmers in Zhejiang, China, who applied more than 20 times as much active ingredient as the Central Luzon farmers.

The low level of insecticide use in the Philippines is the culmination of a declining trend that began slowly in the mid-1980s and accelerated in the 1990s. Among farmers surveyed in Central Luzon, the quantity of insecticide active ingredient applied per hectare increased ten-fold from 1966 to 1979, from less than 0.1 kg/ha to nearly 1.0 kg/ha. But by the middle of the 1990s, this figure had been cut in half. Since then, use has declined even more, and levels of insecticide use are now slightly below what they were before the first Green Revolution began. Recent data from Vietnam also show that farmers have successfully reduced the number of sprays used in rice cultivation by half due to the effects of a well-designed information campaign. In contrast, recent data from China show that per hectare pesticide costs in rice cultivation increased steadily from 1980 to 1998. A similar trend is happening in northern Vietnam. Figure 1 above also shows that insecticide use has been increasing in Indonesia.