The system is ludicrously heavy-handed and will rob our farmers of the most important tool they have to produce food
Neil Parish
The recent European parliament ban on 22 substances linked to cancer is a step too far for agriculture committee chair Neil Parish.
MEPs last month voted to tighten rules on pesticide use banning 22 chemicals believed to be harmful to human health. Writing in the latest issue of the Parliament Magazine, Neil Parish, chair of parliament’s agriculture committee, argues that the parliament’s decision was deeply flawed and based on an unscientific approach.
Read the full text of Neil Parish’s article below:
Please don’t misunderstand me, it is vitally important that any pesticides likely to be harmful to human health or to the environment must be removed from the market. Yet this directive does not target these chemicals. Instead, it identifies a number of potentially hazardous active ingredients within a chemical. If any of these ingredients is present in a pesticide it is banned regardless of the risk its use poses. This method is known as the cut-off criteria approach and is a deeply flawed, unscientific system.
It takes no account of the risk associated with the actual use of the chemical. Much like with salt, many chemicals may be potentially dangerous in their pure form, but are not dangerous to use when administered by highly trained personnel and in concentrated forms. The system is ludicrously heavy-handed and will rob our farmers of the most important tool they have to produce food.
Sadly, this is the story of the entire directive. It has admirable ambitions that I support, namely to control dangerous pesticide use, but it is ill thought-out, badly written, unscientifically based and takes no account of the restrictions already in place to ensure that pesticides are used safely. The repercussions of this in the current economic climate are huge. New products will have to be developed, but few companies will be keen to invest the €100m needed to develop a new fungicide. If these products are not produced, where exactly does that leave our farmers and consumers, who will have to pay even more for their food?
The impact will also be felt far beyond the EU. Companies are likely to cut back on public health programmes in the developing world to concentrate on funding new products to help EU food production. Malaria experts predict that this directive will cause an extra 200,000 extra deaths from malaria every year, because products that can deal with malaria will simply not be on the market.
The developing world will also be hit hard if the EU produces less food. Global prices will rise, there will be a risk of global food shortages, yet the EU is rich enough to import food whatever the price. The developing world will not have that luxury. We have a responsibility to produce our fair share of food, and to remove the key tools of production from our farmers at a time when the world needs to produce more food is folly in the extreme. The short-sightedness of the proposals is best highlighted when we look at potatoes. The only real alternatives to potatoes are rice or pasta, yet rice production is already under threat in most of the world. It is a staple of the diet in many of the poorest countries in the world, yet if Europe decides to import more of it because it can’t grow potatoes in large enough numbers to satisfy demand, it is clear who is going to suffer most.
This legislation fails on every count. It is based on a non-scientific and misleading approach, and will cause little other than misery for farmers, consumers and people in the developing world. It is by no means clear that we have targeted the genuinely dangerous chemicals, either. Protecting both people and the environment from dangerous pesticides is vitally important, but this is not the way to do it.
Read Neil Parish's article in the Parliament Magazine's digital online archive
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