Does China use a lot of pesticides? Taiwan's pesticide use hit a 17-year high. What is the data?

Do you know how much pesticide is used? The amount of pesticide used in Taiwan has reached a 17-year high. Let's take a look at the data. The US court ordered Garrette to pay sky-high compensation and ban Taosong for the protection of babies. Will Taiwan follow suit?

The amount of pesticide used per unit area in China is among the highest in the world. In terms of herbicides, the average amount of herbicides used per hectare in China from 2000 to 2014 was 4.22kg (in terms of effective components), which was about 3 times that of France and Germany and 1.5 times that of the Netherlands, Japan and South Korea. Even Brazil, which has the second largest area of genetically modified crops in the world, uses less herbicides per unit area than China. The latest figures for 2017 jumped to 5.54 kg per hectare, a record high in nearly 20 years.

The Council of Agriculture has launched a ten-year policy to halve pesticides, but the total amount of pesticides used in China in 2017 totaled 15,549 metric tons, the highest since 2000 and an increase of 1045 metric tons over the previous year. Why is the goal of "pesticide reduction" not advanced but reversed? Feng Haidong, director of the Prevention and Inspection Bureau, said frankly that this increase is abnormal and should be related to the competition for paraquat last year. As paraquat is about to be banned, many farmers rush to buy and hoard goods, which is about two years' sales volume. In addition, because it was only last year that the pesticide manufacturing industry, import industry, and retail industry were required to report to the Prevention and Inspection Bureau, "there may be some quantities that have not been reported before." "

In response to the view of the Prevention and Inspection Bureau that there is not enough scientific evidence to prove that it causes cancer, Kuo Hua-Jen, an honorary professor of agronomy at National Taiwan University, points out that there is actually a lot of scientific evidence that it causes cancer in animals. As for human studies, although there are only two or three studies, they all show that they cause cancer to the human body, but there is not enough research so far and can only be classified as "possibly carcinogenic." Taiwan's garnet plug is used too much, not only near the application area, but may be absorbed by the human body through the respiratory tract, and the soil cannot be completely fixed, so it will seep into groundwater, so the use of herbicides should be reduced in an all-round way.

It is absorbed by the leaves, moves down to the branches and roots, seeps into the soil from the roots, or remains in the dead roots, and is decomposed by organisms and microorganisms in the soil. It may also be transferred and absorbed by non-target plants, causing drug damage, and crop residues may enter the food chain, or leached into the water body through soil erosion, affecting the ecology in the water.