Plants, Pesticides, Poisoned Farmlands as Partners of Climate Change

When researchers surveyed three hundred and fifty-three communal farmers in Namibia, almost two percent of them admitted using poison, while predicted poison levels reached up to seven percent in the upper north-west parts of the country.

When investigators examined the indigenous communities in Brazil over the usage of poisons such as pesticides on farmlands, they found that the practice spiked in recent years, growing by over 300,000 tonnes since 2010, with exposure to each resident of Mato Grosso region estimated at 65.8 liters of pesticides in 2018.

When scientists surveyed China for the presence of chemicals from April 2005 until December 2013, over 2.4 million square miles of the country, they discovered that 16.1 percent of the country's soil in general and 19.4 percent of the farmlands experienced the problem of pollution.

Farmlands on a worldwide basis now suffer from pollution through chemicals, including those in the United States, where experts found high levels of farmland  pollution in states such as Texas, Michigan, New York, and Tennessee.

Brazil used in 2021 around 720,000 tonnes of pesticides, about 10.9 pesticides per hectares of farmland, importing as much as 283,000 tonnes of the product two years ago, with each person consuming 3.31 kilograms of pesticide in 2021.

China used around 244,000 tonnes of pesticides in 2021, even though its population dwarfed Brazil’s seven times over, the pesticide per person figure hitting 0.17 kilograms per capita, with the country ranking high on the list of the world’s highest users of pesticides.

South Africa consumed around 26,857 tonnes of pesticides, about 2.2 pesticides per hectare of farmland, according to statistics from Worldometer, the country registering over 3,000 pesticide products, 182 of them hazardous, with only 16 having partial bans or restrictions.

Farmlands on a worldwide basis now suffer from pollution through chemicals, but this arises from a large-scale usage of pesticides, with nations such as Brazil, China, South Africa, the United States, and others culprits.

The use of pesticides by most nations in the world poisons farmlands, leading to degradation, which accounted for up to 4.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions between 2000 and 2009, with experts predicting nearly 70 gigatonnes more carbon would be emitted by 2050,  representing about 17 percent of current annual greenhouse gas emissions.

The use of pesticides poisons and degrades farmlands and impacts on the ecosystem health, since it causes a loss of around $40 trillion worth of ecosystem services per year, about 50 percent of the global GDP of $93 trillion in 2021.

The use of pesticides every year by most nations of the world pollutes farmlands, by exposing the carbon in the soil to oxygen, preventing the soil from playing its role as a carbon sink, reducing the capacity of the soil to retain carbon to the tune of 2,500 gigatonnes, more than three times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and four times the amount stored in all living plants and animals.

Farmlands on a worldwide basis now experience pollution from chemicals, but the pollution also accelerates climate change, because it prevents farmlands from acting as a carbon sink, impacts on the ecological health of the soil, as well as accounts for billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions between 2000 and 2009.

Farmers need to go back to such traditional agricultural practices as crop rotation, the planting of cover crops, and precision agriculture, since the usage of pesticides on a yearly basis can only worsen the present climate crisis.

What to Eat

Vegan food from China, Credit, Epicurious.com