In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. This book criticized what the author regarded as indiscriminate use of pesticides and argued that such use posed an unacceptable assault on the natural world with unforeseen and possibly dire consequences. Silent Spring conveyed a simple and emotive message and helped create widespread public mistrust of pesticide use. It also helped to initiate an era of environmental activism in many other areas of civic life. Subsequently, many of the details used by Carson to support her concerns have been shown to be exceptional or unfounded, but the general thrust of her argument has remained persuasive to the public as a whole.
There are undoubted risks associated with some pesticides, and the presumption of risk with all pesticides seems rational. This leads to care in their use and careful procedures for the approval of new materials. The more difficult case to argue is the public benefit resulting from the prudent and careful use of pesticides, difficult because the benefits, while also undoubted, are largely unseen by the public and require a more complex understanding. The continuously reinforced connection between urbanization and agricultural intensification, including pesticide use, is not understood. One of the challenges facing publicly supported agricultural professionals is that of objectivity. I believe it is appropriate to be skeptical about the need to use a pesticide, but supportive of its use, if the need is established.
Legislation passed by Congress in 1996 called the Food Quality and Protection Act (FQPA) requires the US EPA to reassess all pesticide tolerances during the next ten years. Those pesticides deemed by US EPA to produce the "highest risk" to the public must be reviewed by 1999. These reassessments will be based on a new set of standards that emphasize cumulative exposure to individual pesticides based on market basket consumption surveys and the special susceptibility of children to pesticide exposure through diet. It is assumed, for example, that children have lower tolerance for residues than adults in many instances and the diets of children are different than those of adults. Additionally, exposure to pesticides through the air and water also must be included in setting the tolerance as well as exposure through the use of those same pesticides through home and lawn use. Another feature of the legislation is linking pesticides on the basis of common modes of action. So all organo-phosphate materials (OP), for example, may be combined in a single tolerance for all OPs. Once tolerances are determined, additional use of the pesticide in question is ruled out. There may be no exceptions for economic hardship. Thus, whole classes of pesticides may be eliminated and the use of certain pesticides on minor crops could be jeopardized,. Tolerances for the material may be reached through exposure to residues on majorcrops, leaving no room for use on the minor crops. A great deal of confusion surrounds this process currently, and given the vagueness associated with risk assessment in general, it is unclear what may result.
Some of the "high risk" materials that will be reviewed during the next two years and that are used in California are: aldicarb (Temik), carbaryl (Sevin), chlorpyriphos (Lorsban), and phorate (Thimet). One of the criteria to be used, apparently, in the decision to cancel a use is the availability of alternatives. Permits to use these and other materials on sugarbeets will have to be given by US EPA. They will weigh the need for their use on sugarbeets against the need for use on other crops and the cumulative amount of exposure already borne by the public in making their decision.
Ben Goodwin and I have prepared two lists of currently registered insecticides and their target organism(s), and Ben has prepared a summary of pesticide use by county on sugarbeets from the Department of Pesticide Regulation database. Both tables are included for your information. If you have comments about the need for the pesticides listed or the existence of alternatives or alternative management practices, I would appreciate receiving them.
The price of sugar
People fight about sugar. They always have. The sugarbeet industry in Europe was established as a result of a war between France and England. The English blockaded France and kept out sugar and other products. This was intolerable to the French public so Napolean encouraged the development of the domestic sugar industry relying on sugarbeets, instead of sugarcane, which requires a tropical climate and cannot be grown in France.
Not only have people fought over sugar in the past, they still do. Periodically, stories appear in the press or on television in which the price of sugar is discussed. Typically, the stories contend that the American public is being gouged by high prices for this basic commodity. The argument is made that the price for sugar on the world market is lower than what Americans pay, and the difference is kept by a few rich individuals who have convinced the congress to keep in place legislation protecting the sugar market which benefits only them.
Different groups are benefitted or harmed by the sugar act. It is a source of revnue for the U.S. Treasury, in the form of fees charged the industry for the enforcement of the act. These fees have risen steeply in recent years though the cost of administration has not. Sugarbeet growers, and the agriclutural professionals and service industries who work on the crop benefit from the legislation through their salaries and sales. The sugar companies also benefit, as do the local communites where sugarbeets are grown or processed.
About 70 % of the sugar used in the United States is purchased by large corporations who manufacture baked goods, candies and other products which require sucrose for sweetening and for its beneficial physical properties in food manufacturing. These companies believe that they could purchase sugar cheaper on the world market than in the domestic U.S. market. They are constrained from doing so, however, by the sugar act. These companies believe they are harmed financially by the current legislation, and continually seek its repeal, though their arguement is usually framed by the suppossed harm to consumers from inflated prices. Interestingly, while the retail and wholesale prices of sugar in the United States have fallen in recent years, the price of manufactured foods using sucrose have increased greatly. Perhaps if the price of sugar had been lower still, the price of these food items would not have risen as much, assuming the companies manufacturing them passed those savings along to consumers. But there is no gaurantee that they would have done so.
Trade in sugar is one of the most regulated, and arguably most distorted, of any major world commodity. The majority of countries in which sugar is produced protect their industries or subsidize them in some fashion. So American producers, deprived of some market protection, would face subsidized competition on price. Since most nations want dollars, the U.S. would likely become a sugar dumping ground, and the price may well fall for a time. In the few years in which there was no sugar legislation in the U.S. (1974 and several years following), the price of sugar fluctuated widely, and reached both historic highs and historic lows.
Recently, some sugarbeet journals have published data reported by a British firm (LMC International, Ltd.) that studies sugar markets on the relative cost of sugar in different countries and the relative efficiency of sugar producers around the world. Surprisingly, the cost of sugar to U.S. consumers was among the lowest of the nations reported. Also, it turns out that U.S. sugarbeet producers, aggregated nationally, were the second lowest cost producers in the world in the 1990 to 1995 period. Among U.S. producers, however, California growers are among the higher cost producers. Reducing the cost of production in California per ton of sugar produced remains a difficult and ongoing agronomic challenge. The data in these figures provides some useful information if the subject of sugar price should arise in your work. Sugarbeets are a valuable crop in some farmers' rotations. In general, having more cropping options benefits farmers economically and improves the management of pests and diseases. It would be unfortunate from an agronomic perspective if growers lost the opportunity to grow this crop.
Beet Yellows Virus
The beet yellows virus has caused significant yield loss in sugarbeet crops for over fifty years in California. There is little effective resistance to this aphid-transmitted disease in the beet genome, and the beet-free program to reduce losses comes at the cost of distorting planting and harvest periods and lowering otherwise achievable yields. In the last several years, beet acreage has declined in response to low sugar prices, increasing the isolation of sugarbeet fields. Also, Holly Sugar purchased Spreckels, and in the process the beet-free program has been made simpler and more effective. In particular, the boundaries of the beet free areas have changed and some of the conflicts among the companies and growers in operating the program, especially in the Delta region, have been eliminated. A map of the new beet free areas is included below.
In the last two years, beet yellows virus has become much more rare than previously. The smaller amount of beet acreage, improvement of the beet-free program, and the industry's effort to dig infected fields in fall and not allow them to overwinter has significantly reduced occurrance. There have been no large aphid flights in spring in recent years, so luck also may have helped. It is difficult to tell about the luck.
Despite the lessened occurrance of BYV, it still influences yields in
California by restricting planting times in spring to later than optimum,
and requiring laborous, long-term plant breeding efforts directed at resistance.
If plant breeders could be freed on the necessity to focus on BYV, then
other resistance traits of value to the industry could be developed more
quickly, and yield characteristics like higher sugar percentage may be
more quickly achieved.
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