These early pesticides have been greatly improved. Crop protection chemicals now used by farmers are safer and degrade much more quickly in the environment. Yet, environmental activist groups continue to attack pesticide use. Lately, the rhetoric has become more reckless and desperate.
If pesticides are as harmful to human health as the Environmental Working Group and Consumers Union would have you believe, then there ought to be plenty of proof of this in the Baby Boom generation which has lived 50 years with pesticide-treated food.
If what they say is true - that millions of children today are exposed to unsafe levels of pesticides in fruits and vegetables - then those of us who are Baby Boomers would have had our lives shortened or suffer all kinds of serious illnesses.
The facts say otherwise. Global life expectancy has grown more in the last 50 years than over the previous 5,000 years. A recent major study of midlife adults found that more than 70% of' them consider their health to be excellent. These are the people who grew up eating fruits and vegetables treated with pesticides. If anything, pesticides have contributed to the good health and longevity of Americans. They've made it possible for us to eat a healthy diet, one with plenty of fruits and vegetables.
Still smarting over the bad exposure they got years ago from the Alar scare, activist groups have again attacked apples with full-page newspaper ads intended to alarm parents and pressure the Environmental Protection Agency as it implements a new food safety law. The Environmental Working Group claims that some apples are so toxic that one bite can deliver an unsafe dose of pesticides to a small child. The proof is only in their manipulation of data. No leading medical groups or scientific bodies concur with their findings.
Many Baby Boomers carried an apple every day to school in their lunchbox. As babies, they ate applesauce and drank apple juice. They are now the healthiest group of middle-aged adults that ever lived. Did the use of pesticides on food crops hurt them? Ask them in another fifty years when an incredible number of them reach 100 .
By Stewart Truelsen Director of Broadcast Services, Am. Farm Bureau Federation