A widely held assumption about the use of pesticides in the agricultural industry in Costa Rica puts our country at the top of lists that rank nations by how much they use agrochemical pesticides. At 51.2 kg of pesticide used per hectare of farmland, hospitals in Costa Rica should be filled with patients languishing from poisoning and cancer. Somehow, this is not the case. How come?

The two most-often cited statistical sources when it comes to measuring pesticide use in Costa Rica come from the National University and the World Resources Institute (WRI). The latter defines its pesticide use data set as follows:

Average pesticide use (kg per hectare of cropland 2000). Pesticide use, kilograms per hectare, is calculated by WRI by dividing the total pesticide consumption, measured in kilograms of active ingredients, by the total hectares of arable and permanent cropland.

In 2011, the National University issued a study that illustrated the growth of pesticide acquisition and use in Costa Rica. One of the statistics cited by the study also became cited by news media sources and environmental activists:

Between 1977 and 2006, Costa Rica imported 184,817 metric tons of pesticides, and their use increased by 340 percent.

The National University also issued a clarification on the WRI statistic from 2000, which tends to put smaller countries with significant agricultural statistics, such as Costa Rica, at the top of the list. Other countries such as Mexico, Brazil and the United States are not included in the WRI list. It is important to note, however, that the WRI is also the publisher of books such as The Monsanto Company: Quest for Sustainability. Readers of the Costa Rica Star are familiar as to why Monsanto does not have an office in Costa Rica.

Even from a phytosanitary perspective the WRI statistics on pesticide use in Costa Rica seem alarming. Given the carcinogenic risk associated with pesticides and the high number of farm workers in Costa Rica, one could imagine hundreds of tomato pickers dying of cancer each day. Let’s take a look at Workplace Carcinogen and Pesticide Exposures in Costa Rica, a 2003 study published in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health:

Widespread workplace carcinogens in the 1.3 million workforce of Costa Rica are solar radiation (333,000 work- ers), diesel engine exhaust (278,000), environmental tobacco smoke (71,000), hexavalent chromium com- pounds (55,000), benzene (52,000)… The most ubiquitous pesticides were paraquat and diquat (175,000), mancozeb, maneb, and zineb (49,000), chlorothalonil (38,000), benomyl (19,000), and chloro-phenoxy herbicides (11,000)

According to the study above, workers in Costa Rica have a greater chance of getting cancer from exposure to the sun than from pesticides. What about the ecosystems in Costa Rica, surely they must be dying off from all those pesticides? A 2001 study performed by the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Refuge, which was recently renamed in memory of slain environmentalist Jairo Mora set out to determine how pesticide use was affecting an important lagoon:

A preliminary study was done in order to analyze the presence of 20 organochlorated and organophosphorated pesticides along the Gandoca lagoon in February 2000. None of the pesticides were detected by the analysis of residues from liquid-liquid extractions.

None of the preceding information is meant to minimize the issue of pesticide use in Costa Rica. It is important to know, however, how the news media can sometimes make questionable choices when it comes to using statistics and research studies as headlines. Earlier in 2013, the Costa Rica Star took a look at a similar situation:

For more than a week, news media outlets in Costa Rica and around the world have been publishing articles with eye-grabbing headlines that allude to the worldwide popularity of bananas (Musa acuminata et al) as being responsible for the demise of the Caiman crocodilus in our Caribbean coast. Clever headlines such as “Yellow Peril,” “Crocs Going Bananas,” “Love For Bananas is Killing Caimans in Costa Rica” accentuate a problem that is not being interpreted correctly.

Thanks to science blogger Anne Vezina at ProMusa, who actually read the entire study in the Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry journal, we know that banana cultivation alone is not causing a caiman massacre. The same can be said about the WRI statistic citing Costa Rica as country where people are seemingly wading knee-deep in pesticides.

In recent years, governmental phytosanitary agencies in our country have taken measures to reduce the use of pesticides and other agrochemicals, which has resulted in major instances of rust fungus in coffee farms and cochineal infestations in banana plantations. These two issues, which were minimal in the 20^th century, illustrate the give and take that farmers in Costa Rica are facing due to the reduced use of agrochemical products.