Living in Europe, malaria and DDT are a distant worry. People often fail to realise how deadly the disease is and that pesticides are used as one of the most effective tools for destroying the carrier of malaria – the mosquito.
New scientific research suggests that pesticides have a lesser effect on bees than first thought. The debate took to the airwaves last week on BBC’s Radio 4, here’s the full transcript…
Charlotte Smith (Farming Today, BBC Radio 4): Insecticides may not be as bad for bees as previously thought, according to the American researcher who’d linked bee deaths with a type of insecticide, neonicitinoids. Dr Jeff Pettis from the US Agricultural Research Service now says the chemicals don’t appear to have as big an effect on bee health as he first thought. In the US honey bee numbers have fallen by a third and here too there’s been a decline in the bee population. Well as we’ll hear in a moment environmentalists and the pesticide industry disagree on the safety of neonicitinoid insecticides which are applied to seeds and so are taken up by the growing plant…
Their tiny size and underground existence keeps them out of sight and out of mind; their other-worldly appearance, their crawling, squirming, gnawing, conspire to render them unattractive; but what they lack in beauty, they make up for in numbers and worth. The mites, lice and bacteria that inhabit the world beneath our feet are vital for maintaining balanced ecosystems and agricultural production – quite simply, we could not live without them.
