Pesticide power overflows by Annabel Aitken

Imagine you´re a little bee, minding your own business. The setting, a small farm with small crops. Your wings feel weak, and the crops are irresistible. So you take a small break and decide to pollinate some of the crops. Suddenly, your stomach churns with discomfort and your legs wobble. Dismissively, you begin to flap your wings again to continue on your journey, but within a couple of minutes, your wings stop, and no matter how hard you try, your wings are ignoring your command. As you fall, your legs cripple and you’re dead on the grass. You just ate the pesticides that were sprayed all over the crops in order to protect it, and now you´re dead. More than 4,500 years ago, Sumerians used sulfur compounds as pesticides. 3,200 years ago, the Chinese used mercury and arsenical compounds as pesticides. Since then, pesticides have revolutionised what we have today. Even now many companies in the United States are creating new and improved pesticides. You may believe pesticides are helpful, and they are. They help keep food crisp and assassinate pests. But what are pesticides? Pesticides are poisons that, if touched or ingested, will kill their targets. There are six main types of pesticides. Insecticides kill insects, herbicides kill plants, fungicides kill fungi, larvicides kill larvae, rodenticides kill rodents, and bactericides kill bacteria. Pesticides eradicate their targets in different ways. For example, fungicides hurt the fungi´s cell membranes, disabling proteins, or interrupting energy production. Herbicides prevent the plants from growing by stopping important processes like photosynthesis. Most of the world´s food production depends on bees. Bees pollinate most plants producing 90 percent of the world´s food. So bees are vital to this Earth. Insecticides that are sprayed onto the plants can also kill non-targeted groups. Like bees. Unintentionally, pesticides kill bees when the helpless insect tries to pollinate the flower or crop. Pesticides are responsible for 75 percent of bee deaths every year. Pesticides have a high chance of affecting the Earth in many damaging ways. When released into the air, pesticides gravitate towards the ground and rest on the soil. They then break down by the sun rays to then evaporate and float into the air. When this occurs, humans breathe the pesticides in, which can cause health issues in the future. Another common circumstance occurs after the pesticides have been sprayed on the crops. It can flow down the crop´s stem and submerge through the ground, hitting deep groundwater. In this way pesticides contaminate the water, threatening aqua life and making resources unreliable for humans. Pesticides affect humans in many damaging and harmful ways. Imagine biting into an apple. It tastes funny, but you shrug it off. Probably nothing anyways. You go to bed that day and hope for a dreamless sleep. But you are awoken with an itchy sensation. Your head is pounding aggressively and for the rest of the night you puke your guts out. Not a pretty picture. Pesticides have a risk of causing illness, injury, diarrhoea, itchiness and sometimes even death. Approximately 200,000 people die from contact with pesticides. This means the chemicals we have created can carry to humans and kill thousands each year. Pesticides are extremely toxic and threatening to human life. Although pesticides have many negative traits, there are also many benefits of keeping these liquid substances. Pesticides protect our plants from diseases carried by insects and pests. It’s also really easy for farmers to spray onto the crops without as much effort of performing this activity manually. Sprinkling pesticides mean no diseases from the pests will infect the humans eating it. This liquid chemical also lowers food prices, because if the farmers are doing less work, the prices are lower too. Pesticides not only attempt to save us, but they make sure the plants don´t die either. When insects eat the plants, the plants slowly perish. Around 26 percent to 40 percent of crop production is lost to pests. Pesticides prevent more crops from perishing. New Zealand still uses pesticides many countries have banned due to their toxicity. These chemicals have a higher risk of getting into New Zealand´s fruits and vegetables. New Zealand uses many tons of pesticides every year, more than 5000 tons of these chemicals. China uses more than 1.7 million tons of pesticides and uses the most pesticides of any country. If we get rid of pesticides, many humans will perish. If we continue to spray pesticides over growing crops, bees, humans, and the Earth will die drastically. We need to create a safe method of killing pests that also means farmers won’t overwork themselves. Bees are dying at an alarming rate, and pesticides are the main reason behind this. I agree it’s better to preserve pesticides than to exclude them, as we never want diseases to be spread. But exterminating bees, even if unintentional, will also kill us. We must find a way to control pesticides, and find a way to save the Earth.