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Insecticide spray menace is minute in agriculture
Dec. 2, 2008
The substance of the ruling was that the Government, in the regulations that it applies to crop spraying, has failed to take sufficient account of the risk of spray drift affecting "bystanders" and significant ill-health has been the result.
Defra will almost certainly appeal. If it loses again, I suspect we shall see compulsory "no spray" zones being imposed around residential areas. I doubt if that makes this "the most significant setback for the agricultural chemicals industry in 50 years", as was claimed in the Sunday Times, but the implications will undoubtedly be far-reaching.
Georgina Downs says that she has suffered over 20 years of serious ill-health as a consequence of crop spraying in the fields around her home at Chichester in Sussex, and I don't doubt it for a moment.
What I am much less convinced about is whether her experience, or indeed the other evidence she has amassed, is so truly representative as to justify a change in the law.
Earlier this year, the Health and Safety Executive published the results of a major study into "the prevalence and incidence of pesticide-related illness presented to GPs in Britain." This involved a massive sample. Checklists were completed for over 59,000 people who visited their doctors. Of those, around 2,600 were identified as having been exposed to pesticides and as possibly suffering from a pesticide-related condition, of whom half volunteered to be interviewed in depth.
The headline findings – which, surprise, surprise, attracted only a tiny fraction of the media interest generated by the Georgina Downs case – were that only 42 of the 59,000 patients (0.07 %) attributed their symptoms to pesticide exposure, of whom, according to the GPs concerned, only 20 (0.04%) were actually suffering from a pesticide-related condition.
Bear in mind as well that the vast majority of the pesticide exposure incidents had nothing whatever to do with agricultural chemicals.
Most of the 1,335 patients who were interviewed in depth had come into contact with pesticides either at work or in the home. Only 11 of them attributed their symptoms to spray drift. With the best will in the world, this hardly suggests that Georgina Downs and her fellow sufferers represent the tip of a huge iceberg of human suffering caused by crop spraying.
Dig into the details a little more deeply and you will encounter the quite mind-boggling hypocrisy which the British public displays on so many issues relating to the environment and food safety.
Last year, the NFU conducted an in-depth survey of public opinion on a range of key issues, including pesticides. This found, among other things, that over half of the sample that we interviewed were so concerned about the impact of pesticides on health and the environment that they wanted to see them banned (7%) or at the very least tightly controlled (44%).
And what did the HSE survey find That over 40% of their interviewees were so concerned about the safety of pesticides that they didn't even use the product label as guidance, let alone read it carefully, or follow instructions for use. Just imagine the outcry if a survey of farmers had produced an even remotely comparable result.
Nonetheless, the ruling could hardly have come at a worse time for the agro-chemicals industry and the thousands of farmers and growers who effectively have no choice but to rely upon its products.
Negotiations are going on in Brussels even as I write to try to reach a workable compromise on a new European pesticides directive. Some progress has been made in recent days. The proportion of products likely to be withdrawn as a result of the directive is down from 85 per cent to "somewhere between 5% and 50%," and the UK has succeeded, with Dutch support, in getting the issue added to the agenda for the next Farm Council meeting.
But how much credibility will Hilary Benn have when he launches the attack on tougher controls on agricultural chemicals when he has just lost a major legal battle on precisely that issue in Britain's own courts It might be better if he said nothing at all, and left it to the Dutch.
Even as it is, the "progress" is very much in the two steps forward, one step back category. Measures to require no-spray buffer zones around watercourses and sensitive areas such as hospitals, parks and playgrounds, which had been taken out, are now back in. The target of a 50% cut in usage of the most toxic sprays has been reinforced, and it remains likely that growers of many horticultural crops will be left without an effective weapon to deal with their most potent pests.
The result will be that, instead of being grown in the EU, crops like carrots, parsnips, herbs, strawberries, onions, leaks, peas and beans will instead be grown outside the EU, using precisely the same chemicals as before, and then imported.
Where is the sense – or the sustainability – in that
However, none of this is to argue that pesticides are anything other than a necessary evil. The world would undoubtedly be a better place if farmers and growers didn't have to use them, and if Georgina Down's campaigning or the European Parliament's politicking leads to more research into the alternatives and faster results, then so much the better.
But in the meantime, can we please keep a sense of perspective The amount of ill health attributable to crop spraying is tiny; the benefits in terms of crop yields and prices are huge. Legislation should reflect that balance, not fly in the face of it.
Source: Western Morning News
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