Abstract
We outline an approach to pesticide risk assessment that is based upon surveys of pesticide use throughout West Africa. We have developed and used new risk assessment models to provide, to our knowledge, the first detailed, geographically extensive, scientifically based analysis of pesticide risks for this region. Human health risks from dermal exposure to adults and children are severe enough in many crops to require long periods of up to three weeks when entry to fields should be restricted. This is impractical in terms of crop management, and regulatory action is needed to remove these pesticides from the marketplace. We also found widespread risks to terrestrial and aquatic wildlife throughout the region, and if these results were extrapolated to all similar irrigated perimeters in the Senegal and Niger River Basins, they suggest that pesticides could pose a significant threat to regional biodiversity. Our analyses are presented at the regional, national and village levels to promote regulatory advances but also local risk communication and management. Without progress in pesticide risk management, supported by participatory farmer education, West African agriculture provides a weak context for the sustainable intensification of agricultural production or for the adoption of new crop technologies.
Highlights
The sustainable intensification of agricultural production forms part of a strategy that is emerging to achieve food security [1]
Feedback within this system should improve decisions, and importantly, where either education or regulation is less effective, the other may provide a degree of compensation that protects the system and advances food security goals. This simplified portrayal of two key supports to decision-making illustrates the authors’ current understanding of the complementary relationship between regulation and education in pesticide use decision-making worldwide. It is important for this paper, because we report work from West African agriculture, where regulatory support is very limited, but where farmer field schools have provided some compensation for this by empowering informed decisions regarding pesticide use [2]
We found little evidence that these recommended rates were provided on a widespread basis to farmers, they provided a reasonable basis for the construction of human health risk assessment scenarios and calculations of restricted entry intervals (REIs)
Summary
The sustainable intensification of agricultural production forms part of a strategy that is emerging to achieve food security [1]. Data theme population characteristics farm characteristics work practices pesticide use practices pesticide accidents personal protection training details age, gender, marital status, education, literacy, family size organization (family, group), size, crops, production values (volume) common tasks and division of labour by age and gender, number of days and hours of fieldwork, presence of women and children in fields pesticides, crops, pests, application rate, formulation, area treated, instruments used for mixing and applying, REI, storage people/animals/plants, symptoms, treatment, community health (pesticide related or other) equipment used, protective behaviours, protective clothing, waste disposal practices, water sources and uses frequency and duration, provider, adequacy community and facilitated comparison within and between countries. This represents the authors’ own assessment of criteria that best capture the priorities for action, but we envisage that these criteria could be adjusted by a participatory process at the village scale in the future
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