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…

Dr Pettis first made the link between these chemicals and bee deaths after lab tests.

Dr Jeff Pettis (US Agricultural Research Service): In the lab it seemed clear there was this interaction between very low levels of one of the neonicitinoids and the pathogen. The pathogen went up when they were exposed. Surprisingly though when we went back to those colonies in the field and we had a number of replicates, ten replicate colonies of each one, and we looked at those colonies over time, ‘cause we continued to feed them the pesticide in the field, we didn’t see any change in nosema levels.

CS: So can we conclude that neonicitinoids are safe for bees?

JP: They’re safer than some of the older chemistries certainly. There’s one, one caveat to are they safer, they actually move systemically in the plant so plants, they can either treat the seed or you can treat the soil, the plant will take this up, the bees could be exposed in their pollen and nectar.

CS: Is it really that we don’t know enough about the effects of these insecticides so perhaps there’s an argument for applying the precautionary principle when it comes to using them on farms?

JP: The bulk of evidence over the past ten years in, in a variety of crops has been that bees in some cases are doing better next to crops that used to have other heavy pesticide use.

CS: Knowing what you know would you use a neonicitinoid insecticide?

JP: I might use it in place of a conventional, more conventional one that I know has higher toxicity. So in that sense yes, I think the, the prudent approach is to try to produce food using the, the best methods available. These compounds, they have replaced these more harsh chemicals that were really detrimental to bees, so it really is a balancing act.
I’m doing the research because I’m concerned, I’m highly concerned about pollinator health. But right now I think the balance has to tip in, in favour of their continued use in agriculture, mainly just because of the food production demands that we’re under.

CS: This is though something of a U turn on your original findings which linked neonicitinoids to damaging bee health.

JP: When I was asked about them a few years ago I was surprised by the level of response in, in the lab at very low levels. And with a bit of time in looking back at the colonies as a whole in the field and not seeing the same response, which I definitely would have predicted from the lab studies, it meant that things just aren’t as simple as sometimes they appear.

CS: So from your own research do you conclude that it is a good idea to use neonicitinoids or not?

JP: In light of the evidence that I have to date I would say their use on certain crops is still justified. I think we have to look almost crop by crop. I really can’t give a yes or no answer. It’s, it’s a gradient.

CS: Dr Jeff Pettis from the US Agricultural Research Service.

Listening to that are Matt Shardlow from Buglife, the invertebrate conservation trust, and Dr Julian Little who’s from Bayer Cropscience.

So Matt Shardlow this is all a balancing act.

Matt Shardlow (Buglife): One of the difficulties here is a scientific difference in how easy it is to do lab work and how easy it is to do field work and there’s an awful amount of evidence showing a range of effects in lab work where bees that are exposed to really tiny quantities of neonicitinoids, smaller than they would encounter in the field in pollen and nectar are, are massively impacted in terms of their health. The difficulty with field studies is that it’s much harder to get the information and to control the condition so that your results are scientifically valid. And Jeff Pettis’s …

Dr Julian Little (Bayer Cropscience): But that’s the reason why you have to do those field studies, because if we were just to take laboratory studies as Dr Pettis said earlier, if we’d have just taken the responses from the labs then we wouldn’t have insecticides out there. It’s not surprising in the end that insects …

MS: Julian if I could just finish, as I, as I, Julian …

JL: … are affected by an insecticide (indistinct).

CS: Dr Little you’ve, you’ve made your point, let Matt Shardlow finish his.

MS: So a lot of the studies haven’t been published, they haven’t been peer reviewed. They’re often done over two days and they’re not going to show chronic effects. The work that has been published has now been scientifically reviewed by James Cresswell of Exeter University and he found that even the published work wasn’t able statistically to show the impacts that you would predict from the lab work. And we also have to consider that some of the invertebrates that we’re looking at, for instance moths and butterflies which are also pollinating insects, are orders of magnitude more sensitive to these chemicals than the bees are.

CS: But what Dr Pettis made very clear is that there is no clear yes or no answer here. It’s shades of balancing. So given that we have to feed an increasing number of people don’t we have to just accept that we manage this risk and get on with it?

MS: Well I think those are very similar arguments to the arguments that were used just a few decades ago about DDT aren’t they, you know? And it does take a bit of time for the science to come about through independent means that shows the impacts are big on wildlife and on pollinators. Only yesterday we revealed that in the UK the numbers of incidents involving mass bee deaths from neonicitinoids is on the rise. It’s gone up from nought per cent in 2008 …

Dr Julian Little: No that’s (indistinct) clearly not true and …

MS: … to twenty seven per cent last year in 2010. And when we …

CS: But that’s tiny figures you’re talking there, isn’t it? You’re talking about fifteen incidents altogether and maybe three or four of them might be linked to neonicitinoids.

JL: The idea of saying neonicitinoids, you know, if we were to suspend their use we’d see a big improvement, well that was tried in France for nearly ten years. The result, no improvement whatsoever in bee health.

CS: I’m going to have to bring this discussion to a close. Dr Little do you have any concerns that you are taking risks with something we don’t fully understand yet ‘cause we haven’t given it enough time?

JL: What’s really interesting is that all of the work that’s being done in the field suggests that if used appropriately these products do not pose a risk to insects, important insects such as the honey bee.

CS: Matt Shardlow?

Matt Shardlow: When we put together the Buglife report in 2009 summarising the evidence Bayer and others in the agriculture industry were very keen to point out that there weren’t any mass deaths of bees as a result of these neonicitinoids, but we found out that there are. So you’ve got this accumulation of laboratory studies, very, very weak field studies that aren’t conclusive and then the incoming of new information about increasing bee deaths being reported through the Government. So we think there’s a picture here of, of a chemical where the evidence is building and building that these are causing a damage to the environment and to pollinators.

CS: Matt Shardlow from Buglife and Dr Julian Little from Bayer Cropscience in a rather echoey meeting room, apologies for that. It’s a subject I’m sure we’ll be coming back to.

Sarah Pettitt, a farmer based in Lincolnshire in the UK, who is also Vice Chairman of the Board for Horticulture & Potatoes at the National Farmers Union, spoke to us very passionately about her fears concerning the pending revisions to the European regulation governing pesticides (91/414). Hear what she had to say in the video below.

Defra is to appeal against the judgment of the High Court in the recent case on spraying brought by Georgina Downs.   In a debate in the House of Lords earlier this week junior Defra minister Lord Hunt confirmed that Hilary Benn had been given leave to appeal.   ‘It is not appropriate for me to go into the details of that appeal,’ he said.  ‘But at the end of the day, we all want to see good practice and proportionate regulation.’

A Defra spokesman later said that the High Court’s decision would make it impossible to authorise pesticides for use in the UK.  ‘This would have a very serious impact on farming and food production and would put the UK out of line with the rest of Europe.’   The spokesman added that the protection of the health of those who live, work or visit the countryside remained a top government priority.

Goergina Downs expressed her ‘absolute disgust’ at the appeal and accused the government of the ‘utmost complacency.’   ‘Heads should be rolling, following such a landmark High Court judgment, but instead it’s “business as usual” with the government’s relentless attempts to protect the [pesticides] industry as opposed to the health of its citizens.’

As I have tried to argue in earlier postings, any difficult public policy decision involves a balancing of considerations including food security.   If fruit and vegetables were less readily available or more expensive, this would have health implications.   As I also suggested in an earlier posting, even a non-lawyer could see that the judge was pushing the envelope of what is possible in a judicial review.

There are real public health considerations here, but they would be more effectively resolved through negotiation rather than an adversarial process.

Professor John Lucas, Head of the Plant Pathology and Microbiology Department at Rothamsted Research in the UK, was recently in Brussels to hand in a petition to MEPs that was signed by 72 scientists and agriculturists. The petition warns that the loss of pesticides could lead to serious problems of resistance in key crops in Europe (see previous entry). He granted us a few minutes of his time, during which we asked him about pest resistance, innovation in pest resistance management, the pressures on certain crops, and whether science itself might actually be responsible for resistance in crops.

This week Farmers Weekly Interactive reported that the UK food chain is seeking a meeting with Britain’s Prime Minister over the European Commission’s proposals for pesticide authorisations. The British Retail Consortium,Food and Drink Federation, Fresh Produce Consortium, as well as the NFU Crop Protection Association, British Crop Production Council, Country Land and Business Association and the Agriculture Industry Confederation have all signed the letter requesting the Prime Minister “urgently raise the need for an impact assessment with President Sarcozy and EU heads of state, for further discussion at the European Council level”.

The complete letter is available on Farmers Weekly Interactive

What is left of the sugar beet sector in the UK could be wiped out for good if the European Parliament’s plan for restructing the range of pesticides available to farmers makes it into law, argues the British Beet Research Organisation. The Commission’s proposals would have a relatively small impact. ‘By contrast, the parliament’s peoposals would wipe out the UK sugar industry, because it would be too costly to grow dense stands of healthy, weed-free plants without today’s seed treatments and insecticides, none of which would have been approved.’

Without seed treatments, farmers would have to revert so sowing large amounts of seed, then thinning the seedlings to leave a final strand of plants. This is a labour intensive operation and it was difficult enough to secure the necessary labour when it was last done before 1965, but the research organisation thinks it would be impossible now. Certainly other sectors of British agriculture such as fruit growing have been hard hit this summer because of labour shortages after new restrictions were placed on migrant labour.

The Parliament’s proposal would leave only three of the nine herbicides now used to control broadleaf weeds. Competition in the crucial first six weeks post-emergence would devastate yields. No insecticides would be approved under the Parliament’s plan, principally because of the perceived threat to bees, even though they seldom visit beet fields.

The BBRO estimates that gross margins would drop from today’s average of £648/ha to £537/ha under the Commission’s proposal and just under £215/ha under the Parliament’s proposals. Fixed costs on general cropping farms in eastern England, which is the principal area of sugar beet production, averaged £759/ha in 2006.

Even though sugar beet has agronomic benefits in a rotation, at these margins the UK sugar industry would virtually disappear. A certain volume of production is needed to keep refining plants open.

In a similar vein to what we’re trying to do here on pesticideinformation.eu i.e. present all sides of the story, BBC Radio Humberside recently interviewed spokespeople from both the UK NGO, The Soil Association, and the National Farmers Union, on the impending legislative proposals governing pesticides in the EU. Two well articluated but of course different takes on the issues and well worth a listen.

BBC: Soil Association

BBC: NFU

In this clip, Philip Huxtable speaks about Integrated Farm Management (IFM) on his farm. European farmers are increasingly adopting and developing IFM, which combines traditional farming methods with modern technology and products: ‘the best of both’. This approach combines techniques such as crop rotation to prevent the build-up of certain pests in one field, choosing varieties of crops which are more resistant to disease, crop sanitation, and biological controls i.e. promoting beneficial insects that eat target pests, and only using pesticides (chemical crop protection) as the last line of defence.

If you are interested in knowing more about Integrated Farm Management, we recommend this report by DEFRA, the UK government Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

As promised last week, here’s some more footage from our visit to JSR Farms in East Yorkshire, where Philip Huxtable, who has run JSR Farms for over 30 years, spoke to us about the potential effects of the proposed revision of the European Directive governing pesticides (91/414).

In this clip, he speaks about the threat of septoria on wheat, and the family of fungicides he uses to treat it - triazoles. These are under threat from the proposed revision, and could potentially cost him 30-40% of his annual yield.

As also mentioned in our last entry, Mr Huxtable’s statements of course represent a farmer’s views. We would recommend that you listen to this report from BBC Humberside radio by Chris Arundel, who was also present at the event, which seeks to provide a more balanced view of the issues (Mr. Arundel interviewed Elliott Cannell of thePesticide Action Network, an anti-pesticides NGO).

Earlier this week, we attended a farm visit at JSR Farms in East Yorkshire, United Kingdom (disclosure: the event was organised by ECPA). The event was an “information day” for the press, aimed at providing a farmer’s opinion on the effects the proposed revision of the current pesticide legislation (Directive 91/414) will have on his ability to grow food. The farmer in question was Philip Huxtable, an agronomist with 30 years experience as a farmer, and currently the Managing Director of JSR Farms. Below you will see a few short clips from the visit in which Mr. Huxtable gives his opinion on what is driving the legislative process, potential impacts on yields, as well as his closing statement from, as he put it, his “political soapbox”!

Next week, we will be posting some entries in which Mr. Huxtable speaks in more detail about pest management on single crops, such as wheat and potatoes, the threat posed by plant diseases such as septoria and blight, as well as his use of integrated farming techniques, to not only protect his crops, but the environment and wildlife on his farm.

Of course, Mr Huxtable’s statements very much represent a farmer’s views. We would recommend that you listen tothis report from BBC Humberside radio by Chris Arundel, who was also present at the event, which seeks to provide a more balanced view of the issues (Mr. Arundel interviewed Elliott Cannell of the Pesticide Action Network, an anti-pesticides NGO).