Pesticides in Europe

Europe votes to ban pesticides was the headlines, but the reality is actually far more complex. The European Parliment has voted to ban about twenty of the most dangerious agricultural chemicals. These are the ones that are belived to cause cancer and are know to have a serious impact on human health. But the way the media have been reporting this would leave most people thinking that the agricutural industry were being left with no means of controlling pests or desises.

What Europe, and its population, has recognised is that it is no good producing in large volumes of food that is contaminated with these chemicals and are likely to damage peoples health. In one test carried out last year, 2008, over forty percent of the fruit and vegtables on sale to the public were contaminated with these chemicals at leavels that breached the safe legal minimum. Therefore, while farmers and the agricultural industry argue that they only spray these chemicals when they need to, because of the cost implications, the reality is the industry sprays routeenly. Chemical farming, often called conventianal farming, will spray these chemicals as a profolactic. This helps ensure good yields, and increased profit.

The difficulty seems to be that the Agricultural Industry has lost sight of the fact that they are producing food. If chemicals were only used when there was a problem, then most of the problems caused by these pesticides would not occur. No residue contamination on food, less pollution of the environment, better nutritional value from the crops. About ten years ago the UK government had to issue a food safety warning that people had to peel carrots as there was surface chemical residue from the chemicals used. Now as most of the vitamins are in the surface area of the root, pealing them instead of scrubbing them, means that the consumer is not gaining the full nutritional value from the carrot. This is just one example where for the sake of financial gain, the farmers, the agricultural chemical industry, the supermarkets needs have produced an illogical response. As at the same time, the British government are spending millions trying to promote people to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables per day.

Also staying with the Carrot example, all this extra peel adds to domestic waste just when the government and local authorities are trying to get people to reduce waste. The logical way of dealing with the problem of pesticide residues in food is to reduce or stop using the chemicals, not telling people to peel their vegetables.

The real problem for the chemical farmers is that they have structured the way they farm. In the past fields were smaller, bounded by hedges and these hosted the beneficial insects that would eat many of the pests that affect crops. By ripping out these hedges, while making it easier to get larger and larger machinery in to the vast fields, the farmers (although in reality we are talking about industrial growers) lost the beneficial impacts from wildlife.

I am not trying to paint a completely rose tinted picture, as there will be an impact on yields, but this will not stop Europe from feeding its people, as is being claimed. Nor will we see massive price rises, and what increases there will be will more than be offset by lower health care costs.

One of the other aspects of the changes in pesticide regulations that were being lost in the noise of protests from vested interests is that spraying of these chemicals will be banned around places like hospitals and schools.

On the whole, this will have a great impact on health, nutritional standards and the environment.