The Misguided Campaign Against DDT Is Killing Millions
Doug Bandow, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author and editor of several books, including The Politics of Plunder.
Wealthy countries have it easy. Their citizens are richer. Their people enjoy healthier and safer environments. Yet Western nations are hindering Third World people from improving their lives—in the name of the environment.
Malaria is seen as a poor nation’s disease, but it once afflicted today’s industrialized states. Decades ago people in the United States and Europe suffered from this, one of history’s most ravaging diseases. But malaria has essentially disappeared in the West.
Poor countries are not so lucky, however. Up to a half-billion people contract the disease every year; as many as 2.7 million die. It kills one in 20 children in sub-Saharan Africa. Harvard University’s Jeffrey Sachs figures that this huge human toll in turn cuts economic growth rates in Africa in half.
The problem is not that people don’t know how to combat malaria, which is caused by a mosquito-borne parasite. It’s that they have not been using the best tool, dichloro-diphenyltrichloroethane—DDT.
Introduced in 1945, DDT’s instant success led to a Nobel Prize for the scientist who discovered the pesticide’s effectiveness. DDT is estimated by the World Health Organization to have saved some 50 million lives. The pesticide essentially wiped out malaria in America and Europe.
The benefit to poor nations was also enormous. For instance, after the introduction of DDT, malaria diminished dramatically in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.
In India, annual cases dropped from 100 million in 1935 to 300,000 in 1969. In Sri Lanka the number fell from 2.8 million 1948 to just 17 in 1963. Bangladesh was even declared to be malaria-free. Similar progress was evident in countries like South Africa. Although geography, logistics, and poverty make eradication difficult in Africa, DDT still made substantial progress possible.
Unfortunately, the pesticide was also used indiscriminately for agriculture. Although there is no persuasive scientific evidence that DDT harms humans, it did reduce the population of raptors and songbirds. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped generate pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency to ban DDT in the United States in 1972, despite the lack of evidence that it harms humans.
Most other industrialized states followed suit, discontinuing production of the insecticide. Moreover, through the United Nations Environmental Program they pressed Third World states to drop their use of DDT. For a time the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and other environment groups pushed to eliminate DDT by 2007.
Poorer nations reacted in horror; reducing use of DDT proved to be a disaster. Sri Lanka stopped spraying DDT in 1964; the number of malaria cases skyrocketed to a half million in just five years. Instances in South Africa jumped tenfold over the last five years alone.
Scientists came to DDT’s defense. Former U.S. Navy Surgeon General Harold Koenig says that “DDT remains probably the most effective, affordable tool with which to fight malaria in the developing world.”
Amir Attaran of Harvard University’s Center for International Development says that with the treaty “environmentalists sought to promote an environmental goal at a calculated risk to human life.” Such a prohibition is “going to kill people.”
And it doesn’t require a genius to figure out who will be dying. “Setting a firm deadline to ban DDT places an unethical burden on the world’s poorest countries,” argue more than 600 scientists in a letter circulated by the Malaria Foundation International.
Lauding Malaria
Yet some environmentalists have, weirdly, lauded malaria for having the unexpected benefit of discouraging agricultural development of “wild areas.” Luckily, most are not so misanthropic.
Under pressure, the WWF retreated from its support for an absolute ban, claiming that it merely hoped to stimulate the resources necessary to allow poorer states to adopt alternative policies. But last August the group went so far as to support the principle “that human health is not compromised as reliance on DDT is reduced.”
In early December 2000 international negotiators concluded a treaty banning Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)—a dozen toxins ranging from DDT to dioxins and PCBs. The accord put 11 on Annex A for elimination, and DDT on Annex B for restricted use. Countries must formally take advantage of the latter provision.
Opened for signature a year ago in Stockholm, the treaty requires 50 ratifications to take effect. Unfortunately, the regulatory strictures of the treaty may be sufficient to deter some poorer nations from using the chemical. Moreover, Greenpeace is seeking to close down India’s DDT producer, one of only two in the world. That would further raise costs and reduce availability. Warns Attaran, environmentalists thus “may accomplish through the back door what they couldn’t accomplish through the front door.”
The political atmosphere surrounding the treaty also poses a problem. Despite their public protestations to the contrary, some leading environmentalists still seem committed to eliminating DDT. Both the WWF and Greenpeace emphasize that the treaty’s most important purpose is to eliminate all POPs. The Pesticide Action Network and Physicians for Social Responsibility are also on the ban-wagon.
This indirect treaty pressure has been exacerbated by the aid policies of Western governments. According to Richard Tren and Roger Bate in a new study for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Belize and Bolivia have dropped their use of DDT out of fear of losing foreign subsidies for public-health programs. Mozambique was discouraged from introducing it.
Explain Tren and Bate: “Mozambique is one of the world’s poorest countries and has been struggling to rebuild its national infrastructure and economy after a civil war that lasted nearly 20 years. Due to these circumstances, the country is heavily reliant on donor funds for the provision of even the most basic services to its population.”
Although 15 countries indicated their intention to utilize the treaty exemption and use DDT, another ten that probably should have joined them did not do so. Roger Bate worries that “they failed to do so because of pressure from international aid organizations.”
Yet DDT should not be in the same category as the other 11 POPs, linked as they are to birth defects and other ailments. DDT’s harms are far less severe. Its benefits are far greater.
As one South African official told the Washington Post: “We understand that if we don’t take care of the air and the land and the water, it will kill us—but it will take 20, 30 years. Malaria will kill you tomorrow.”
Moreover, while there are alternative pesticides—Cyfluthrinand Deltamethrin, for instance—they tend to be substantially more expensive. And since they are also used as agricultural pesticides, resistance to them is greater. As a result, they will save fewer lives.
In short, the campaign against DDT is misguided.
