Pesticides have long been established as potentially health damaging, with some of them linked to cancer. In a populational US-wide study that considered not only farmers who actively use pesticides but communities as a whole, researchers contextualised cancer risk associated with pesticide use and smoking. They found that living in an environment heavily exposed to pesticides could increase the incidence of cancer as much as smoking. The strongest association was among non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, and bladder cancer. In these types of cancers, the effects of pesticide exposure were more pronounced than the effects of smoking. Frontiers

 

 

Agroecological farms conserve biodiversity, restore soil fertility and maintain crop yields under conditions of environmental and climatic stress. Most outperform industrial agriculture in terms of total production, resilience, energy efficiency, biodiversity conservation, and water use. More importantly, they lay the foundation for food sovereignty, diversification of diets, and improvement of people’s health, says Miguel Altieri, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the General Coordinator of the United Nations Sustainable Agriculture Program, and a scientific advisor to the Latin American Consortium on Agroecology and Development. Altieri also says, "The global food system has failed the resilience test and is not up to the task of feeding the world in the face of the global environmental crisis. Industrial agriculture poses a major threat to our planet’s health, contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity. Continuing with the current agricultural paradigm is not an option." Terra Madre

 

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