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The War on Bugs

By Will Allen

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Poisons

The use of toxic pesticide on a large scale in America began in the late 1860s with the use of arsenic to control the Colorado potato beetle, which at the time was threatening commercial potato farms in the west and quickly spreading east and north. In spite of the skepticism of the general public toward the use of arsenic, and the ongoing debate in journals about its safety, the fact that arsenic worked both as a medicine and as a pesticide ensured its ultimate success in the marketplace. Its success paved the way for all the poisonous pesticides that followed, helped by the chemical companies' aggressive promotion of pesticides and the unregulated market they enjoyed, which allowed them to make unsubstantiated claims and minimize the risks of these poisonous substances.

"Regulation"

However, there was still resistance to the widespread, unregulated use of toxic substances. Multiple poisonings that occurred in the mid 1890s as a result of unsafe amounts of arsenic and lead residues in farm produce led the 1906 Congress to create the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to deal with the national uproar that resulted. And in 1912 the Congress established the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to deal with the massive amount of fraudulent advertising complaints. These new regulatory agencies, however, fell short of their stated purpose and goals due to the following reasons:

They failed to protect the public from the health dangers of pesticides in the food, only guaranteeing a certain level of toxic potency in the pesticides to ensure that they were effective.
While the ads were just as deceptive as before and the products still dangerous and often useless, the public believed that the new regulations protected them.
The large-scale farmers were by now hooked on arsenic and other quick-fix chemicals for their survival.
At the same time, the FDA and the FTC protected the large chemical corporations and large-scale farmers and largely ignored the consumers they were purportedly created to protect.

The War on Farms

Since the introduction of guano in the mid nineteenth century, constant propaganda by magazine editors, chemical merchants, and scientific experts had been pushing farmers to rely on commercial sources of nitrogen instead of natural manures and fertilizer crops. In the early twentieth century, a series of world-wide events, including World War I, further increased the use of artificial means of fertilization by farmers, both large and small:

Peruvian guano supplies were depleted and sodium nitrate from politically unstable Chile was the only significant supply of munitions, industrial, and agricultural nitrogen.
Prominent fertilizer experts worried that the planet was dangerously short on nitrogen fertilizer.
German scientists discovered processes for creating nitrogen for fertilizer and for explosives.
Some of these processes produced cyanide gases as a by-product.
Eventually, both agriculture and the military in the United States and abroad came to depend almost exclusively on the new nitrogen supplies.
Many of these synthesized chemicals and waste products were used as antipersonnel weapons for the first time in World War I by both sides, resulting in at least 100,000 deaths and over a million serious injuries.

After World War I, the domestic advertising emphasis shifted to synthetic nitrogen and mixed fertilizers, as U.S. companies joined the synthetic fertilizer market. As a result of this and other economic and ideological pressures of the times, an attempt was underway to reduce farming to mechanical military strategies, in spite of the fact that many farmers still preferred to use animal manures and crop residues for fertilizer throughout the 1930s and 1940s. This push to mechanize farming played a part in the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, both of which drove great numbers of farmers off their land. While the populist movement on farms had held strong throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, harsh economic realities and the hopelessness of the depression eventually took its toll on working people and small farmers. Meanwhile, the industrial capitalists increased their monopoly of resources all over the world.

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The War on Bugs

Poisons

"Regulation"

The War on Farms

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