If saving lives isn't the goal . . . ban DDT

My very first job working for my advising professor was writing a handbook chapter on the economics of pesticides. Lichtenberg and Zilberman proposed the "safety-rule approach" to pesticide policy determination that combines a probabilistic risk assessment model with a safety-rule decision mechanism. It yields estimates of the uncertainty-compensated trade-off between risk and social cost can be used for policy determinations that rely on formal decision criteria like benefit-cost or risk-benefit. In the context if this kind of criterion, it is clear that bans on DDT, particularly in Africa, are suboptimal. The potential to save lives far exceeds the risks of adverse health effects. One million people die from malaria annually and yet malaria was once nearly eradicated by DDT and could today be killed off once and for all. Yet, those who fight to save millions of lives from malaria do so with one hand tied behind their backs. The dubSJ editorialized in defense of DDT yesterday and suggested that some in the environmentalist movement don't share the goal of many in the health world of actually saving lives:

Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, was a leading opponent of the insecticide DDT, which remains the cheapest and most effective way to combat malarial mosquitoes. Rachel Carson's 1962 book, "Silent Spring," misleadingly linked pesticides to cancer and is generally credited with popularizing environmental awareness. But other leading greens of the period, including Nelson, biologist Paul Ehrlich and ecologist Garrett Hardin, were also animated by a belief that growth in human populations was harming the environment.

"The same powerful forces which create the crisis of air pollution also are threatening our freshwater resources, our woods, our wildlife," said Nelson. "These forces are the rapid increase in population, industrialization, urbanization and scientific technology." In his book "The Population Bomb," Mr. Ehrlich criticized DDT for being too effective in reducing death rates and thus contributing to "overpopulation." Hardin opposed spraying pesticides in the Third World because "every life saved this year in a poor country diminishes the quality of life for subsequent generations." For these activists, malaria was nature's way of controlling population growth, and DDT got in the way.

As with other chemical-use policies and regulation of agricultural biotechnology, policy on DDT could benefit from a dose of Zilberman-Lichtenberg cost-benefit logic.