22
Jan
Study Finds That People Attribute Highest Social Costs of Pesticides to Adverse Health and Biodiversity Effects
(Beyond Pesticides, January 22, 2025) A study published in Nature Scientific Reports in December 2024 sheds light on how people value the benefits of reducing or eliminating pesticide exposures. The study, based on economic concepts, is a meta-analysis of studies that have attempted to discern what that value is in monetary terms. This study shows the difficulty in gleaning from the existing literature an assignment of true value of social costs associated with pesticide contamination and poisoning, however, was able to glean several points of interest:
- People’s “willingness to pay” (WTP) is higher for health benefits than ecological ones.
- In studies that included pesticide risks associated with cancer, the social cost (WTP) tripled.
- People’s WTP is higher to prevent or ameliorate chronic diseases than to treat or avoid acute exposures.
- If the study did not specify a pesticide type—even general categories such as herbicide, insecticide and fungicide, and most studies fell into this category—the WTP is significantly higher.
- In ecosystem terms, use of the term “biodiversity” results in higher WTPs compared to other aspects such as groundwater or aquatic organism health.
- Consumers are more risk-averse than farmers.
- The higher the income, the higher the WTP.
Social cost is distinguished from the cost of externalities, such as water contamination cleanup, morbidity and mortality, damages, lost pollination and more. The authors equate the “willingness to pay” (WTP) with the “social cost of pesticides.” In behavioral economics, WTP is the maximum price a buyer is willing to pay for a product or service. Social costs are the personal costs to an individual for the actions he or she performs, such as making a product, plus the externalized costs to everyone else—in this case the damage to human and ecosystem health. The terms are based on an underlying assumption that people will pay more for things they value more, and that a measure of how much people are willing to pay for mitigating or preventing pesticide damage is reflective of the degree of concern society assigns to the hazards and risks of pesticides compared to their benefits.
The authors, from The Netherlands and Canada, faced enormous heterogeneity in the literature they were analyzing because there are few commonalities in methodology, number of participants, or even specification of particular pesticides among previous studies. In fact, the authors state, “The main conclusion is that there exists no single global value estimate for the social costs of pesticide use [and] there is widespread variation in existing value estimates.” The best the authors could do, given the inconsistencies in their data, was to estimate the average global cost of pesticide use at $51 per person per year. That is, taking the entire world population, that is how much humanity is willing to pay to reduce the risks of pesticide exposures annually.
This figure cannot be more than a ballpark guess. The U.S. and Europe, where most of the studies were conducted, were willing to pay more than countries like Vietnam, but given the very wide disparities of both money and information globally, the average is almost meaningless.
But there are deeper assumptions in economics. One is that all players have access to all the relevant information. This is not the case with respect to pesticides. The authors note that “most chemicals used in agriculture do not meet international safety standards, and are in fact highly toxic to humans and the environment” according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. However, this knowledge is not necessarily reflected in the economic behavior of consumers and farmers. Pesticide companies have far more knowledge than their customers about the toxicity of their products, and they exploit this asymmetry avidly, creating yet another economic problem: “moral hazard.”
Last August, Beyond Pesticides analyzed a study showing that pesticide labels fail to convey the hazards and risks of pesticide exposure, and that this failure affects users’ willingness to pay for less toxic products. Current labels use CAUTION, WARNING and DANGER to inform the user. In the experiment, the researchers used two other symbol systems: circles in traffic light colors and skull intensity symbols. Participants’ understanding of the pesticides’ toxicity improved from 54 percent to 95 percent using the traffic light colors and rose to 83 percent using the skull symbols. This improved understanding led to participants choosing the less toxic pesticides.
The current study’s meta-analysis included 49 primary studies published between 1990 and 2023. The participants’ attitudes toward risks were divided between human health and ecological health. For human health, the meta-analysis subdivided the pooled responses into farmers and consumers. There was great variation in the categories and definitions used in the subject studies, so the researchers divided the effects into bins: cancer, acute and chronic effects and unspecified effects. Of the 107 studies involving consumers, 58 did not specify particular effects and 42 included cancer. The 52 farmer studies were more evenly distributed across the bins, but with only four studies including cancer. For ecological concerns, participants were asked to value risks to terrestrial and aquatic organisms, surface and groundwater, and biodiversity.
Another concept involved in the assessment of WTP is baseline risk. In medicine, baseline risk is the chance that a person will contract cancer, for example, without the exposure of interest, such as a pesticide. People will use their general impression of baseline risk to decide how much they are willing to pay to prevent or lower the risk. In the meta-analytic study, the researchers found that “individuals are willing to pay higher values to reduce medium and high risk levels compared to low baseline risks.” Further, in studies that failed to define “the specific baseline pesticide risks,” respondents gave “significantly lower WTP estimates for pesticide risk reductions or elimination of these risks. Thus, the absence of information about baseline risks in…surveys makes respondents undervalue pesticide-related risks. Similarly, not specifying the public health implications of pesticide use significantly lowers mean WTP.”
Here again, there is manipulation of the consumer or farmers’ ignorance as to the real risks of pesticides. One simple and obvious correction would be for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to meaningfully reform pesticide labeling to convey those risks more accurately. As was noted in our August Daily News, terms currently required on pesticide labels are ineffective. Further, EPA allows one participant in the economic transaction, the pesticide manufacturer, to withhold enormous amounts of relevant information from the other participant, the farmer or consumer. For example, EPA relies on toxicity testing performed by or on behalf of the manufacturer which is not available to the public before the product is registered, and EPA does not require pesticide manufacturers to disclose toxicity data of so-called inert ingredients.
The meta-analysis’s framework for assessing people’s concerns with pesticides and their desired solutions reflects even deeper assumptions in economics that any consequences to society can be assigned monetary values, and that the measure of a society’s value of some activity or substance is how much people are willing to pay for it or to avoid it. These assumptions have permeated environmentalism in the form of “ecosystems services” in the hope that this will preserve ecosystems. But ecosystems are literally priceless, because people cannot exist without them, and people want to preserve them for more than economic reasons.
This kind of monetization skews public discourse because it reduces all human values to those operating in financial transactions. Yet there is growing interest in a “well-being economy,” one that incorporates numerous values not directly connected to standard economic measures such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Defined as the “total market value of the goods and services produced by a country’s economy during a specified period of time,” the GDP is treated as a proxy for the health of a country. In a white paper on the well-being economy, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) admits that “taking GDP as a single compass does not provide policy-makers with a sufficiently rich and accurate picture of the way in which the economy performs for citizens or of the long-term impacts of growth on sustainability.”
Clearly the asymmetrical information system between people exposed to pesticides and pesticide manufacturers undermines both human and ecological health. The meta-analysis authors note that even recent economic valuation research on pesticide reduction preferences “continues to lack critical information on the risk characteristics of the specific chemical substances involved. Such reporting would be consistent with current chemical regulations, such as the European Union’s registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemicals in its 2007 REACH legislation, which [is] based on the specific risk profiles of individual and compound substances and their associated toxicity.”
If economic approaches to protecting the health of humans and the environment are to be useful, this information asymmetry is one of the first things that must be corrected. Beyond Pesticides offers a rich archive of both detailed information about hundreds of pesticides’ human and ecosystem health effects and ways to push for rational policy reform reflecting the evidence of harm. See our Pesticide Illness and Disease Database (PIDD). For consumer resources on safer management of pests, including weeds and insects, see the Safer Choice page. See Tools for Change for a range of strategies, resources, and tips to initiate grassroots advocacy in your community, town, city, or state against pesticide use on lawns, public land, and agricultural lands.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
Sources:
The social costs of pesticides: a meta-analysis of the experimental and stated preference literature
Nature Scientific Reports
Rufo et al.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-83298-3#Abs1
Study Finds Pesticide Product Labels Fail to Convey Toxic Effects to Consumers
Beyond Pesticides, August 28, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/08/study-finds-pesticide-product-labels-fail-to-convey-toxic-effects-to-consumers/
The economy of well-being: Creating opportunities for people’s well-being and economic growth
Llena-Nozal et al.
OECD 2019
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-economy-of-well-being_498e9bc7-en.html
Study Captures Agronomists’ Advice to Farmers and Continued Reliance on Toxic Pesticides
Beyond Pesticides, July 12, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/07/study-captures-agronomists-advice-to-farmers-and-continued-reliance-on-toxic-pesticides/
A Meta-Analysis of the Willingness to Pay for Reductions in Pesticide Risk Exposure
Travisi, Chiara et al
EconStor 2004
https://hdl.handle.net/10419/117978
Improving consumer understanding of pesticide toxicity labels: experimental evidence
Hosni et al.
Nature Scientific Reports 2024
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-68288-9
