Putting an End to Endosulfan

Imagine being the person who in the early 1950’s developed endosulfan, a new and cheap way to protect a very wide variety of crops and plants only to find out half a century later that it is destroying the environment and ecosystem. Not to mention it was used abundantly worldwide for decades and now it is even showing up in dust from the Sahara Desert as well as Arctic ice samples. It is highly unlikely any endosulfan was applied to any crops out in the middle of the Sahara Desert or up in the Arctic. Now being left with a few decades of organochlorine pesticide to clean up with such a vast range of areas affected by it due to long range atmospheric transport how would such a process take place? Is there a way to balance economical pest control and environmental pollution?

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has defined the term of pesticide, “As any substance or mixture of substances intended for preventing, destroying or controlling any pest, including vectors of human or animal disease, unwanted species of plants or animals causing harm during or otherwise interfering with the production, processing, storage, transport, or marketing of food, agricultural commodities, wood and wood products or animal feedstuffs, or substances which may be administered to animals for the control of insects, arachnids or other pests in or on their bodies.” There are many subclasses of pesticides, two of which include insecticides and acaricides. These subclasses can be grouped into chemical families. Some of the common chemical families of insecticides are organochlorines, organophosphates, and carbamates. (Vivekanandhan and Duraisamy 2012)

Over 40 years ago the organochlorine pesticides were introduced. At the time they seemed to be gr...

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