Agriculture and Environment: Orange Juice

Environmental Impacts of Production: Pesticides & Inorganic Fertilisers

Orange production requires more intensive use of a wide range of pesticides than any other major commodity including bananas.

Only horticultural crops have higher input use per hectare than oranges. However, oranges produced for juice require far fewer pesticides than those sold as fresh fruit.

Frequent use of the pesticides
In Belize a number of pesticides are used in the cultivation and production of oranges for juice. In 1994 most commercial orange cultivators in Belize reported the frequent use of the following pesticides: paraquat, fosetyl-al, 2,4-D, glyphosate, aldicarb, diuron, propiconazole, ethoprop, ethion, malathion, phoxim, terbufos and chlorpirifos.

Paraquat, diuron, and glyphosate are broad-spectrum herbicides that kill all types of vegetation; the use of these three chemicals suggests that the technical recommendations to producers have been to maintain clean fields of monoculture crops with the possible exception of species planted for ground cover.

Major Impacts - degradation of soil
Clean production systems have tremendous impacts on biodiversity (both resident and mobile, both in the sil as well as on it) as well as soil erosion and the overall need for chemical inputs.

The application of inorganic fertiliser, coupled with a clean fields approach to cultivation, has had perhaps the single largest impact on the environment. Orange production on clean fields results in ever decreasing levels of soil carbon.

As a consequence, any chemicals applied to the soil are more likely to be washed off as effluents before they can be utilised by plants. Even the application of foliar fertilisers, while meeting the needs of the trees, may result in the degradation of soil so that it has diminished ability to utilise and take up the fertilisers. In addition, chemicals subsequently leach into waterways and lagoons.