Abstract: This report addresses issues related to public concern about the safety of continued reliance on pesticides in agricultural production. Topics discussed include: the lack of understanding of how food is grown; the role of pesticides in food production; the risk assessment, regulating processes, and alternatives to pesticide use; and the limits on citizen participation in food safety debates and agricultural decision making. This publication was produced for individual citizens and organizations concerned about agriculture and food safety and interested in raising their community's awareness of the topic.

Arsenic is a toxic metalloid of global concern. It usually originates geogenically but can be intensified by human activities such as applications of pesticides and wood preservatives, mining and smelting operations, and coal combustion. Arsenic-contaminated food is a widespread problem worldwide. Data derived from population-based studies, clinical case series, and case reports relating to ingestion of inorganic arsenic in drinking water, medications, or contaminated food or beverages show the capacity of arsenate and arsenite to adversely affect multiple organ systems. Chronic arsenic poisoning can cause serious health effects including cancers, melanosis (hyperpigmentation or dark spots, and hypopigmentation or white spots), hyperkeratosis (hardened skin), restrictive lung disease, peripheral vascular disease (blackfoot disease), gangrene, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and ischemic heart disease.

This book explores human exposure and consumer risk assessment in response to issues surrounding pesticide residues in food and drinking water. All the three main areas of consumer risk assessment including human toxicology, pesticide residue chemistry and dietary consumption are brought together and discussed. - Includes the broader picture - the environmental fate of pesticides - Takes an international approach with contributors from the European Union, USA and Australia - Highlights the increasing concerns over food safety and the risks to humans

Peri-urban aquacultures produce nutritious food in proximity to markets, but poor surface water quality in rapidly expanding megacities threatens their success in emerging economies. Our study compared, for a wide range of parameters, water quality downstream of Bangkok with aquaculture regulations and standards. For parameters not meeting those requirements, we sought to establish whether aquaculture practice or external factors were responsible. We applied conventional and advanced methods, including micropollutant analysis, genetic markers, and 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, to investigate three family-owned aquacultures spanning extensive, semi-intensive and intensive practices. Canals draining the city of Bangkok did not meet quality standards for water to be used in aquaculture, and were sources for faecal coliforms, Bacteriodes, Prevotella, Human E. coli, tetracycline resistance genes, and nitrogen into the aquaculture ponds. Because of these inputs, aquacultures suffered algae blooms, with and without fertilizer and feed addition to the ponds. The aquacultures were sources of salinity and the herbicide diuron into the canals. Diuron was detectable in shrimp, but not at a level of concern to human health. Given the extent and nature of pollution, peri-urban water policy should prioritize charging for urban wastewater treatment over water fees for small-scale agricultural users. The extensive aquaculture attenuated per year an estimated twenty population equivalents of nitrogen pollution and trillions of faecal coliform bacteria inputs from the canal. Extensive aquacultures could thus contribute to peri-urban blue-green infrastructures providing ecosystem services to the urban population such as flood risk management, food production and water pollution attenuation.

In this study, a multi-level interval fuzzy credibility-constrained programming (MIFCP) method is developed for planning the regional-scale water-energy-food nexus (WEFN) system. MIFCP can not only deal with uncertainties expressed as interval parameters and fuzzy sets, but also handle conflicts and hierarchical relationships among multiple decision departments. The MIFCP approach is then applied to planning the WEFN system of Henan Province, China. Solutions of three different decision targets in various hierarchy levels, five scenarios with different decision makers’ objectives and five credibility levels toward different necessity degrees are examined. Several findings in association with various planting structures, water resources demand, energy consumption, fertilizer and pesticide utilizations and system benefits are achieved. Results reveal that the future total irrigation water can decrease by 1.49% from years 2020–2025. Results also disclose that the total cultivated area can change by 1.91% owing to the variation of fertilizer and pesticide change. Compared to single level programming (SLP) and bi-level programming (BP) approaches, the MIFCP-WEFN model can help decision-makers identify the optimal agricultural water resources management schemes by means of the leadership of water resources managers as well as the feedback of two diverse followers (i.e. energy managers and agricultural managers).