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0 pointsRetric11y ago0 comments

That's a perfectly rational argument, however there is a long history of pesticides turning out to be more harmful than originally thought. There are even commonly used pesticides that are known to be harmful to people that are still in common use with the assumption that the residue is not harmful.

Unfortunately, that's vary hard to test as the population for a study is much smaller than the population effected by any given pesticide. When you include environmental effects the argument generally becomes one of acceptable harm. As there is also a ridiculous oversupply of food there also clearly over used.

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specialist11y ago

...pesticides turning out to be more harmful than originally thought.

Licenses (to sell pesticides) should be periodically reauthorized, given the current best available science. Factoring cost to benefit in the authorization, of course.

Like all these intractable policy issues, at the heart it's about governance. Right now the burden of proof (of harm) is on the critics. That's inefficient and unnecessarily adversarial.

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0 pointsRetric11y ago0 comments

0 comments

specialist11y ago

...pesticides turning out to be more harmful than originally thought.

Licenses (to sell pesticides) should be periodically reauthorized, given the current best available science. Factoring cost to benefit in the authorization, of course.

Like all these intractable policy issues, at the heart it's about governance. Right now the burden of proof (of harm) is on the critics. That's inefficient and unnecessarily adversarial.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse