Andrew Kenny in The Spectator writes

Judged on sheer evil, the worst crime in history was brown, the Nazi genocide, although the reds slaughtered more people. The death toll (difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler’s holocaust 6 million, Stalin’s famine and terror 8 million, and Mao’s famine 30 million. But the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was the banning of DDT. …

In 1971 DDT was poised to rid the world of malaria. In 1972 it was banned. …

This was the time of Rachel Carson’s mendacious book Silent Spring, about the horrors of pesticides, when the newly emerging green ideology was looking for a cause célèbre. … The greens, leaning heavily on Ruckelshaus, were determined to ban it and did so, with catastrophic consequences for poor people with dark skins. Tens of millions of humans were sacrificed on the green altar.

The US extended the ban overseas by various measures, including refusing aid to countries that used DDT. Other rich countries, urged on by their greens, followed suit. Malaria, which had been in retreat, came surging back, killing multitudes.

In a review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear Ron Bailey agrees with Crichton that the greens killed 50 million:

Along the way, Mr. Crichton makes vividly apparent how environmentalist misinformation costs lives and money. He has Kenner tell fatuous Hollywood environmentalist Ted Bradley (Martin Sheen?) that banning DDT was “arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century.” Why? Because DDT was the best defense against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. “All together, the ban has caused more than 50 million needless deaths,” Kenner says. “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted. And the environmental movement pushed hard for it.” True enough.

Junkscience has a death clock that puts the death toll even higher at 90 million deaths.

DDT use and malaria incidence However, it is conceivable that relying on a science fiction writer and an astroturf web site might not be wise. so I checked to see what the peer-reviewed scientific literature. “Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India” published in Nature by Chapin and Wasserstrom tells us what really happened. The graph on the left shows that malaria did skyrocket in India in the 70s. But not because they cut back on DDT spraying because of pressure from environmentalists. The graph shows that they didn’t cut back on DDT, but dramatically increased its use. So how come malaria increased? Well, the increase in DDT use was in agriculture. This caused the insects to become resistant, so they had to use more DDT to get the same effect. This caused more resistance, so even more DDT was used and so on. The end result was that in the areas where DDT was used in agriculture, the mosquitoes became completely resistant and DDT no longer stopped them from spreading malaria, with the disastrous results shown in the graph.

Was this catastrophe predictable? Well, yes. In fact, Rachel Carson warned about it in Silent Spring. If India had followed the example of the United States and banned the agricultural use of DDT and reserved it for public health many millions of cases of malaria would have been prevented. However, India probably could not have afforded the more expensive alternative insecticides to DDT, so this may not have been feasible. But there were other alternatives that would have greatly reduced pesticide use and slowed the development of resistance. Chapin and Wasserstrom continue the story:

In response, entomologists developed what they call integrated pest management systems[85-86], the key to which lies in timing insecticide applications so that the crop is protected from predators only at the most vulnerable stages of its growth cycle. As it turns out, cotton buds destroyed by pests regrow throughout the plant’s life, so that producers can afford to sustain a high level of insect damage before there is a need to apply pesticides. Simple precautionary measures may also lower their chemical costs: up to 75 per cent of the hibernating boll weevil population may be eliminated by the ploughing under of crop debris after harvest. Thus many growers west of the Mississippi now spray their fields only seven or eight times each season instead of 25 or 30; similar measures have been developed for raising corn, rice and many kinds of fruit[87].

So why did WHO not urge cotton producing countries to employ integrated management systems that would not interfere with malaria eradication programmes? A possible answer may perhaps be found in the activities of another international agency, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Like WHO, FAO was established to provide technical advice and assistance to members of the United Nations. In the case of pesticides, which are manufactured and distributed by a few multinational corporations, FAO’s advice might have played a critical role in reducing environmental contamination. Both farmers and extension agents in developing nations must normally rely on pesticide company salesmen for information about how to use agricultural chemicals — much as physicians in Western countries rely upon pharmaceutical companies for information about new drugs. Beginning in 1967, therefore, FAO put together a small working group of experts on integrated pest management which published technical manuals and disseminated other information[88-94].

Three years later, it commissioned an American entomologist, Dr Louis Falcon, to develop an integrated system in Nicaragua, a system which achieved remarkable success within a few seasons. Similar programmes were subsequently undertaken in Mexico, Peru and Pakistan[95].

But FAO did not recommend these programs.

Why did FAO choose this course of action, which in retrospect does not appear to have been guided by an accurate appreciation of the perils of pesticide addiction? It is important to examine how pesticide manufacturers have influenced the policies of international agencies. As public concern about the effects of toxins like DDT began to grow in the 1960s, these corporations formed a trade association called GIFAP (Groupement International des Associations Nationales de Pesticides) which in turn worked directly with UN technicians through a FAO bureau known as the Industry Cooperative Programme (ICP). By the early 1970s joint FAO-ICP regional seminars had been organized in many parts of the world to promote new and better ways of distributing agricultural, pesticides. More important, high-level officials in WHO and FAO, who share the industry’s views on many major issues, invited GIFAP to play an active part in agency “consultations” and other internal meetings[98,99]. In this way, for example, no fewer than 25 corporate representatives lent their expertise to the meeting in Rome on pesticides in agriculture and public health and served on subcommittees responsible for formulating UN policy. Not surprisingly, these subcommittees stressed the need to apply more pesticides in a more effective manner rather than to limit their use or replace them with alternative forms of pest control. And what is more curious, none of these deliberations included representatives of other international constituencies such as environmental groups, labour unions or farmers’ organizations. Perhaps for these reasons, in June 1978, the current director general of FAO, Eduard Saoumi, finally expelled ICP from his agency[100].

So the people with significant responsibility for the resurgence in malaria were the chemical companies that stymied efforts to reduce the agricultural use of pesticides. And it was chemical companies that helped set up the astroturf junkscience site that has attempted to blame Rachel Carson for causing the resurgence. Nice. It’s like a hit-and-run driver who, instead of admitting responsibility for the accident, frames the person who tried to prevent the accident. Bastards.

Update: See follow-up post