Human health and pesticide use in Sub-Saharan Africa

While pesticides-such as insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides-are often promoted as inputs that increase agricultural productivity by limiting a range of pre-harvest losses, their use may have negative human health and labor productivity implications. We explore the relationship between pesticide use and the value of crop output at the plot level and a range of human health outcomes at the household level using large-scale, nationally representative panel survey data from four Sub-Saharan African countries where more than 10% of main season cultivators use pesticides. We find that pesticide use is strongly correlated with increased value of harvest, but is also correlated with higher costs associated with human illness, including increased health expenditures and time lost from work due to sickness in the recent past. We take these results as suggestive that the findings of more targeted studies are indeed generalizable beyond their original, purposively chosen samples.