Conventionally grown cotton takes its toll on the environment.
Merril, Macormac and Mauersberger state in the American Cotton Handbook: A Practical Reference Book for the Entire Cotton Industry
As explained by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) , the reason growing cotton is such a problem is “the cotton plant is unusually attractive to insects and probably no other cultivated crop has as large a list of insect enemies.
Among these are some of the most destructive pests in the history of agriculture”. Cotton is attacked by aphids, bollworms, lygus bugs, whiteflies, boll weevils and many more damaging pests. To deal with these pests, a host of environmentally harmful pesticides is used on the cotton crop.
Eighty million pounds of pesticides were applied to American cotton fields in 1995 according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. This puts cotton second only to corn as the highest pesticide using crop in the United States.
The problem is not just exclusive to America – “$2.6 billion worth of pesticides [are] applied to cotton worldwide each year” (The Fatal Harvest Reader
).
What is even more frightening, however, is, last year the USDA stopped tracking and reporting the pesticides which are used on American farms each year citing budget constraints (Chicago Tribune).
