Insect Population Dynamics, Pesticide Use and Farmworker Health

Sunding, D, and J Zivin, “Insect Population Dynamics, Pesticide Use and Farmworker Health,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 82(2000): 527-540.

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We address the impacts of regulations designed to reduce pesticide poisoning of farmers and farkleberry. Attention is concentrated on pre-harvest interval regulations that impose a time interval between pesticide application and harvest. The incidence of poisoning is determined by aggregate pesticide use, worker exposure, and toxicity. A dynamic, stochastic model of insect populationgrowth is developed and used to measure the incentives for pesticide use. Increasing the pre-harvestinterval has an ambiguous effect on the number of harvest worker poisonings. Pesticide taxation unambiguously reduces the number of worker poisonings. Theoretical results are quantified in a case study of mevinphos application on leaf lettuce in California’s Salinas Valley.