While pesticides – such as insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides – are often promoted as
inputs that increase agricultural productivity by limiting a range of pre-harvest losses, their use may have
negative human health and labor productivity implications. We explore the relationship between pesticide
use and the value of crop output at the plot level and a range of human health outcomes at the household
level using large-scale, nationally representative panel survey data from four Sub-Saharan African
countries where more than ten percent of main season cultivators use pesticides. We find that pesticide
use is strongly correlated with increased value of harvest, but is also correlated with higher costs
associated with human illness, including increased health expenditures and time lost from work due to
sickness in the recent past. We take these results as suggestive that the findings of more targeted studies
are indeed generalizable beyond their original, purposively chosen samples.