Sustainable agriculture and the use of pesticides

Sustainable agriculture involves practices that has to fulfil several requirements. The most important limiting aspects are: environmental issues and public health aspects. Pesticide use seemingly is in conflict with these limiting factors because of the general belief that pesticides are hazardous to the environment and to human health. However, long-term experiments demonstrated that pesticides can only temporarily suppress the population of useful as well as harmful insects and other organisms. Under natural conditions, the balance in the composition of insect species is generally restored in a short time period. Furthermore, biochemical evidences show that the toxicity of pesticide residues in food is much lower in test animal experiments than the toxicity of several natural constituents of foods. The only realistic way of sustainable agriculture is to balance chemical and non-chemical control measures by applying integrated pest management (IMP) principles.