Enantioselective Analyses of Persistent and Modern Pesticides. A Step Toward Sustainable Agriculture

Abstract

In the conflicting goals of sufficient food for a growing world population and conservation of natural ressources, the safe use of environmentally friendly pesticides plays an important role. A general concept of sustainable agriculture and how modern, efficient pesticides comply with the basic ideas of a sustainable farming are given and discussed. Modern pesticides often are mixtures of stereoisomers with largely different biological properties on the target and non-target organisms. More and more of these pesticides are used in enantiopure forms, leading to clearly reduced risks for the environment. The assessment of the fate, environmental concentrations and risks related to the use of a specific compound relies mainly on modern environmental analytical techniques, such as enantioselective high-resolution gas chromatography with various mass spectrometric detection techniques. Several of these techniques are described and selected results presented.