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Managing Food crop pests without compromising yield and environment-By DR. Chandrasiri Kudagamage Source:Island Insect pests cause substantial damage to our food crops. Insecticides are normally applied to combat them. However, dependency solely on insecticide for pest management has resulted in various undesirable environmental and human health problems. Human health is affected by the consumption of food with insecticidal residues. Also, the destruction of friendly insects such as pollinators, predators and parasites, is among some of environmental effects of indiscriminate use of insecticides. Long-term persistence of some chemicals in the environment and frequent exposure to these chemicals may also result in different forms of cancers. Sri Lanka ranks very high as regards pesticide-related health hazards and around 20,000 poisoning cases are reported per year and of them 1,600 are fatal. Seventy percent of them were related to suicide. (Registrar of Pesticide) With the development of herbicide resistant crops like soya bean, ...