Pesticides and Worker Safety

Abstract

A key problem in pesticide regulation is uncertainty about health risks. Trade-offs between economic benefits and worker health safety are examined using an empirical illustration. Alternative decision rules for regulation under uncertainty are considered: a safety fixed rule, which protects individuals from excessive health risks, and uncertainty-adjusted cost-benefit analysis, which evaluates aggregate trade-offs between health and economic welfare. These criteria may lead to opposite policy conclusions, suggesting that the most appropriate public policy is a safe minimum standard (SMS), which allows weighing of costs and benefits only after some minimum acceptable level of health safety has been assured.

International Food Safety Standards and the Use of Pesticides in Fresh Export Vegetable Production in Developing Countries: Implications for Farmer Health and the Environment

“…As expected, results also show that the primary pesticide applicators incur higher health costs. Although not surprising, it corroborates previous findings by Harper and Zilberman (1992) from U.S. agriculture. Among the mitigating and averting variables, pesticide applicators who change clothing contaminated by pesticides and wash off the pesticides from their bodies (change clothing) following accidental leakage by the spray pump experience lower cost of pesticide illness than those who do not, presumably because they reduce duration of skin contact with pesticides.…”

Economic and policy issues of U.S. agricultural pesticide use trends

“…The FQPA standard did not entirely eliminate the problem that Breyer described, because USEPA cannot consider benefits of use when setting new residue tolerances for raw or processed foods, except in special cases. The FQPA standard is similar to what Harper and Zilberman call a safety‐fixed rule . Such rules allow an ‘efficient allocation of regulatory restrictions affecting a single chemical,’ but do they not ‘address directly the trade‐offs between aggregate economic benefits and environmental risks …, nor do they assure an efficient allocation of social resources among regulations affecting different chemicals.’ As a result, the marginal cost per life saved or illness prevented by tolerance decisions could vary from pesticide to pesticide, depending upon the relative cost‐effectiveness of alternatives.…”

“…Within the context of benefit-cost analysis, the use of a pesticide would be regulated so that the marginal benefit of the regulation (costs avoided by reducing risks) equals marginal cost (lost economic benefits). 83,84 According to Breyer, if the marginal cost of risk reduction (the cost of preventing the last unit of adverse effect, such as saving a statistical life) is greater for some regulations than others, risks could be reduced more costeffectively by making regulations with higher marginal cost less stringent and/or those with lower marginal cost more stringent. 85 The FQPA increased regulatory flexibility, on the one hand, by resolving the Delaney Paradox, but reduced flexibility, on the other, by imposing risk standards in place of risk-benefit comparisons.…”

The Economics of Pesticides and Pest Control

“…Viscusi and Hamilton (1999) offer a nice overview of the literature to motivate their analysis of EPA decision making in the cleanup of hazardous waste sites. Harper and Zilberman (1992) examine the trade-offs between economic benefits and worker health safety with uncertainty, using the cotton pesticide chlordimeform as an illustration. They compare a safety-rule analysis that protects individuals from excessive health risks to uncertainty-adjusted cost-benefit analysis, which evaluates aggregate trade-offs between health and economic welfare.…”