Role of chemical plant protection products in worldwide food security (literature review)

The contribution of pesticides to food security from the 1960s and up to 2100, when the Earth’s population, according to United Nations forecasts, will reach a sustainable value of 10.2 billion people, is considered. There are presented international estimates of the effectiveness of pesticides for crop preservation, the economic feasibility of their use. Side effects of pesticide use, such as the development of resistance and non-target drift, are discussed. A brief description of the system developed in the Soviet Union for substantiating hygienic standards for maximum permissible levels of pesticide residues in food products of plant origin, carried out in accordance with the principle of integrated hygienic standardization, which consists in the fact that the possible intake of a drug into the human body with food products, water, and atmospheric air should not exceed the permissible daily dose for an average-sized person is provided. This approach, applied today in the post-Soviet space, is unique in world practice, since in other member countries of the World Health Organization, when establishing maximum permissible levels (MPLs), the potential intake of the active substance from the environment (water, air) is not taken into account. It is concluded that the use of chemical plant protection products will remain the basis for ensuring food security in the foreseeable future since it is not only cost-effective, but also necessary in the context of population growth and the impossibility of proportionally increasing the area of agricultural land.

The material for this review was mainly data from foreign literature because such analyses have not been published in the domestic press before. One of the reasons for this is the methodological complexity in collecting and evaluating the necessary data for the Russian Federation. When searching for information, the SpringerLink, Scopus, Medline, Google Scholar, RINTS and CyberLeninka databases were used.

Contribution:
Masaltsev G.V. – concept and design of the study, collection and analysis of literary data, writing the text;
Veshchemova T.E. – concept and design of the study, collection and analysis of literary data, writing the text;
Rakitskii V.N., Kuzmin S.V. – concept and design of the study.
All authors are responsible for the integrity of all parts of the manuscript and approval of the manuscript final version.

Conflict of interest. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgement.The study was carried out within the framework tof the industry programs of Federal Service for Supervision in Protection of the Rights of Consumer and Man Wellbeing (Rospotrebnadzor) “Scientific justification of the national system for ensuring sanitary and epidemiological well-being, health risk management and improving the quality of life of the population of Russia” (2021–2025).

Received: November 1, 2024 / Revised: November 27, 2024 / Accepted: Decembeer 3, 2024 / Published: December 28, 2024