Doctor, we shall be glad to hear from you at this time. Please proceed. STATEMENT OF DR. ROBERT VAN DEN BOSCH, CHAIRMAN, DIVI. Mr. VAN DEN BOSCH. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to come before your subcommittee and discuss this subject. My name is Robert van den Bosch. I am professor of entomology in the Department of Entomology and Parasitology, University of California, Berkeley, and chairman of that department's division of biological control. My career as a professional entomologist extends back to 1949 when I was appointed to the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station. After spending 2 years in Honolulu, I joined the staff of the Citrus Experiment Station, University of California, Riverside, where I remained until 1963 when I moved to the Berkeley campus. During the course of my professional career I have worked on a wide variety of insect pests including fruit flies, and pests of citrus, deciduous fruits, vegetables, cotton, alfalfa, walnuts, ornamental plants, and other crops. I have published more than 100 technical and semitechnical papers, including about 20 dealing largely with insecticides. I have been a member of research teams that have pioneered integrated control programs in the massive alfalfa, cotton, and walnut industries of California. I have also traveled extensively in connection with my work on biological control so that I have been able to observe pest problems worldwide and consult with entomologists in many foreign countries. I belong to a spectrum of professional societies and scientific fraternities. Today I appear here as a private citizen on my own leave time to comment on the chemical insecticide problem. I think it is quite obvious that there must be a problem, otherwise there would not be the necessity for meetings or hearings of this sort. In carrying on this discussion today, I would like to point out that I will be alluding largely to agricultural pest problems or insect control problems. A major reason for today's insect control dilemma is that the bulk of our available insecticides are ecologically crude. Some are, in fact. biocides and others, perhaps the bulk, zoocides. This alone is cause for concern, but the system of pest control advisement-and I am talking particularly here on the agricultural level, and the use pattern of insecticides-are equally alarming. Thus, as matters stand today, the use of some of the most toxic and ecologically disruptive chemicals developed by science, is based as much on salesmanship as on indicated need. The man who characteristically analyzes pest insect problems and recommends the use of chemical insecticides is neither required by law to demonstrate professional competence nor is he licensed to practice. I point out that I am alluding to the agricultural situation. ed re 10 Now, this is a blueprint for disaster, and the resultant edifice is apparent to anyone who cares to look at it or observe it. In other words, 25 years after the DDT development we have more pest insect species than ever before. Scores of our most serious pest insects have developed resistance to pesticides. For example, of the 24 major species, recorded on cotton, over 50 percent are resistant to insecticides here in the United States. In California, of those insects that do more than a million dollars' worth of damage a year, over 40 percent are resistant to insecticides. In other words, the major pests are the ones that are resistant. A corollary of this is that the cost of insect control has mushroomed and, of course, the general environment has been polluted by insecticides. This is a matter of record. Those who unilaterally champion chemical control typically herald its obvious benefits. We hear this time and again-the untold numbers of lives saved, human lives, bellies filled, and dollars earned. But they ignore or minimize its negatives effects, just shove them under the carpet, so to speak. To them these are of little importance when measured against the material gains of men. Why grieve over the passing of the peregrine falcon? It was just a speedy bird. But, of course, that lamented hawk symptomizes the ecological malaise that is the overwhelming concern of our time. Who is next in line? The Norway rat? The mourning dove? Homo sapiens? I think that Norway rat might outlast us or maybe it will be the cockroach. The modern insecticide is ecologically crude because nowhere in its synthesis, development, or utilization is serious consideration given to the essentially ecological nature of insect control. Senator YOUNG. Would you yield at that point for a question? Senator YOUNG. About the only DDT that is used in my State now is by the cities to control mosquitoes. They do not seem to note any decrease in number of birds or any damage to them. If there was, I think you would find an uproar from the people living in these cities. Farmers rarely use DDT in North Dakota. Mr. VAN DEN BOSCH. Well, this is true in California, but you have to understand that there is a load of DDT in the biosphere that is still accumulating and we have, of course, the sad fate of the brown pelican in California which is not reproducing any more and this has been thoroughly studied and DDT is the incriminated material. Again I allude to these things as symptomatic. I am an ecologist and when I observe and read reports of this sort, I become very concerned about the ecological impact. But you are perfectly right, in California we have-the State department of agriculture has essentially eliminated I would say over 90, 95 percent of the use of DDT but the material is slowly degradable and it is still floating around or moving around in the biosphere. Is that sufficient? Senator YOUNG. Yes. Mr. VAN DEN BOSCH. The modern insecticide is ecologically crude because nowhere in its synthesis, development, or utilization is serious consideration given to the essentially ecological nature of insect control. The materials are devised to kill the widest possible pest insect spectra, and thereby capture the widest possible markets. This ba sort of law in the insecticide industry, that we cannot make a materia that will earn enough money unless it can kill a broad spectrum of insects, and so these materials continue to be churned out. In practice this is the way the materials are used, and the enving ment be damned. I might point out that in California, for instance, in cotton, with lygus hesperus, one of our main pests, there are about a half doze. proprietary materials registered for use against that pest. They an all more or less the same kind of insecticide. They do the same It is like having six different labels on penicillin, and for that 8 million Lygus market you have fierce competition by the compare to get their share of the money. And quite ironically, as evidence will develop, this problem is affecting the pocketbook of the user, ton. No one, certainly I do not-disputes the concept of chemical insetcides used as ecologically selective tools to help maintain the balare of insect pollutions. This hardly differs from the use of dras or medicines, therapeutic drugs or prophylactic medicines in humal infections. And so the argument against existing chemical nest onttrols is directed not to the concept but to the way in which the materials are synthesized and developed and particularly the way in which they are exploited wherein marketing of the materials becomes a major end in itself, perhaps the dominant factor in insert control. Any agent, use, or concept which ignores the basic ecological nature of insect control courts failure, if not disaster. In chemical insect con trol, merchandising, cupidity, ignorance, and user apprehension and guillibility now dominate the practice. This cannot continue, for if it does an ecological and economic disaster of increasing proportion wil surely result. I think this is a safe prediction and the symptoms are already wide read, for instance, the ravaging bollworm infestations in cotton Texas, poisoned chicanos in California, DDT in the brown pellican And one can go on from there. Tonstrate the kind of ecological and economic disaster that have Attended the use of modern insecticides. I would like to include revers A Des Ray Smith and Hal Reynolds in California on cotton wird wole and by Dr. P. L. Adkisson of Texas A. & M. on the disaster in the Foo Grinde Valley of Texas and northeastern Mexico, subserment *ter is a resn't of the best control attempts in cotton. I will not go into detail in these. They are here in this copy of the renare. I wou'd suggest that anyone interested read these very They are string documents of just the kind of ecologica.en Cod, and even sociological disaster to which I allude. Von. I may seem to be overemphasizing cotton, but after a”. greatest ingetide user in the United States and workin of plus pedest insecticide users. So I think it stands as Izał problems that are confronting us. Ted Leply we will find simar or developing problems trin, doodious fruits, certain kinds of field er 15, 2 " od experpone has also been largely in cotton.. which is generally overlooked and I think this is a serious omission, and that, is the economic suffering of the insecticide user himself. In other words, in many crops under prevailing practice there is reason to question whether any economic benefits at all result from insecticide use. This, of course, implies a widespread exercise in futility where insecticides are used, which is doubly lamentable because this futile dispersal of poisons into the environment is done at considerable ecological cost. Over the past 5 or 6 years in California a team of entomologists has conducted more than 40 experiments. One experiment even embraced 4 square miles of cotton, four sections, a million dollars' worth of cotton of which one whole section was an untreated control. I repeat, so we have run about 40 of these experiments. The overall result is that there has been little or no economic gain from the use of insecticides in these experiments. Of course, in certain of them we did effect striking yield increases. But the point I am trying to make here is that when we average the gains and losses measured in dollars expended for insecticides, depressed yields in certain cases where we used insecticides, versus gains, the result was about zero as far as gain is concerned. Now, extrapolation from these experimental results leads to the conclusion that in commercial practice pesticides are often applied to insect populations which are either noninjurious or only marginally so. I am not saying that there are not numerous damaging insects or insect situations that are damaging. I am merely saying that there are many situations where insects being controlled when control is not necessary. Our studies also indicate that much of the cotton pest problem in the San Joaquin Valley develops directly from pesticide use itself. That is, treatment applied against one pest, for instance, the Lygus bug, trigger outbreaks of other pests, for instance, the cabbage looper, spider mites, and bollworm, and this is the classic situation they are now confronted with in southern Texas. These induced pest outbreaks in turn require their own chemical treatments. The great irony here is that many of these secondary outbreaks result from pesticide treatments that in themselves are unnecessary and applied at economic loss. This adverse feedback places a double impost on the grower for not only is he hooked onto a costly pesticide treadmill but his crop suffers from the damage caused by needlessly induced pest outbreaks. And then there is the further grave result, of course, of aggravated environmental pollution. I might say in several of our experiments where we have used heavy doses of methylparathion, and in one case, carbaryl, a carbamate, we reduced yields because of physiological effects of the insecticides on the cotton plants, even though we reduced the bollworm infestations quite dramatically. This is an aspect of this heavy pesticide load that we had not previously understood. Recently an agronomist with one of California's largest ranching companies informed me that pest control costs on about 20,000 acres of cotton farmed by that company, had been reduced by approximately 60 percent under an integrated control program developed in conjunction with university researchers. I assure you that when we get this kind of reduction in costs on large acreages, certain people are unhappy, but the farmer in this case has had a striking economic bonus and just as importantly, there has also been an ecological bonus, for on this one ranch alone tons and tons less insecticides are now being dumped into the environment. Our integrated control research in California clearly indicates that similar reductions in insecticide usage can be readily realized in such major crops as alfalfa, apple, citrus, grape and peach. In other words, we have research programs already underway in these crops where we have tangible indications of this sort. And as we extend our efforts into other crops, similar results will be attained. We are quite certain of this. But the implementation of this kind of progressive insect control will be slowed to a crawl if legislative changes which bring the insect control technocracy up to the level of the next management technology are not forthcoming. The biocides and zoocides must be phased out. The whole process of insecticide registration and labeling must be overhauled. For instance, currently the user of an insecticide has no legal recourse for financial redress when, in fact, the use of an insecticide for a given pest, say the Lygus bug, induces a severely damaging outbreak of bollworm. I have personally appeared as a witness in two cases of this sort, and in both cases the complainant lost because it was either pointed out that this could have been a natural act or he should have known better anyway or he was just a poor farmer. But the point here is that under the current registration and labeling process where these secondary pest outbreaks and pest resurgences have occurred, the grower is the absolute victim and he has no chance. for economic redress. And the diagnosis of insect problems, the recommendations for prophylaxis and therapy and the dispersal of nostrums must be taken out of the hands of salesmen and become instead the responsibility of licensed, independent, professionals whose modus operandi simulates that of the M.D., pharmacist, laboratory technician and other technologists associated with human medicine. In other words, again I allude to the fact that here we have these highly sophisticated chemicals and yet the system of advising on their use and dispensing them, is in the hands of salesmen, not in the hands of professional practitioners. The question will be asked, who will support this sophisticated profession-I contend that society will and gladly, once it is convinced that under the status quo it is squandering millions of dollars on a ramshackle, ineffective, costly and environmentally disruptive pest control system. Look at the current situation in California, where an estimated one thousand pesticide salesmen practice their trade. I reaffirmed these estimations with a leading sales executive of one of the major pest control companies the other day. It takes approximately $25.000 a year to pay the salary and bonuses of a salesman and to defray his operating expenses (i.e. the expenses for the supporting office staff, advertising, and so forth). In other words, the agro-economy of California and ultimately the consumer expends approximately $25 million annually to sup |