In the United States, bioengineered plants that target specific pests without damaging beneficial insects are expected to be planted on more than 10 million acres of farmland during the summer of 1998. The worst problem foreseen by U.S. scientists is that insects will rapidly adapt to the Bt toxins and put us back at square one. EPA, he writes, has become bogged down with the Sisyphean task of assessing the impacts of thousands of new pesticides pouring out of the industrial research pipeline. If research were conducted and judged by a more diverse group of stakeholders, including farmers, Winston says, more viable alternatives would be developed. Although not mentioned by Winston, this idea is currently being tested in a Department of Agriculture grant program called Sustainable Agricultural Research and Education, which sponsors only research involving both farmers and scientists.
Farmers judge the potential utility of each proposed project before it is funded.
Perhaps the most obvious reason why we haven't replaced pesticides is because they are so damn cheap. Winston says that if the hidden costs of pesticides could be taxed, the alternatives would become more economically appealing. But taxing the environmental and health effects of pesticide use will be a tough battle. Unlike the case of cigarettes, in which rigorous and voluminous data on societal costs have been collected, the United States still does not have good data on pesticide costs. It is amazing that 35 years after Silent Spring was published, the most often quoted estimate is the dubious Pimentel number.