Delegates at the Royal Society of Medicine have heard that the true extent of pesticide use is at odds with the claims of the pesticide industry.
The new evidence presented at the conference indicated a massive increase in pesticide use over the past 40 years and warned of its harmful impact on human health, even in very low doses.
The Government’s data on pesticide use in farming is held with FERA Science and was extracted for the first time for the conference. The data presented covered three British crops: wheat, potatoes and onions. It showed that, far from a 50% reduction as the pesticide industry has claimed, increases in active ingredients applied to the crops have in fact risen by between 480%-1,700% over approximately 40 years.
The data was accompanied by new global scientific evidence on the effects to human health that even a very low exposure to pesticides has.
“It is frightening to learn just how many aspects of the pesticides we eat in our food are untested by pesticide safety regimes”
Presenting the findings was Professor Carlo Leifert, director of the Centre for Organics Research (Southern Cross University, Australia) who described the situation as ‘circular’, saying the use of pesticides is ‘embedded in the farming system’.
“Supermarkets recognize there is a problem with some pesticides. No farmer likes to spray, but if he is dependent on making money it is very difficult to give up that spray,” says Leifert.
Reacting on behalf of the Soil Association, policy director Peter Melchett says: “It is frightening to learn just how many aspects of the pesticides we eat in our food are untested by pesticide safety regimes around the world, including in Europe. People eat food sprayed with increasingly complex mixtures of pesticides, and no safety testing is done on mixtures. In addition, there is now overwhelming scientific evidence that tiny quantities of these sprays, well below levels considered by regulators to have ‘no observable effect’, do have both observable and negative impacts on human health.”
Professor Leifert and Peter Melchett were joined in presenting this significant new scientific evidence by Dr Michael Antoniou, King’s College; Keith Tyrell, PAN UK; and Professor Anne Marie Vinggard, Danish National Food Institute.
