Pesticide Information

Please find below some recent articles on pesticides and related topics. Do feel free to recommend more articles by selecting “Recommend a page or site” above or access a more comprehensive list of articles by using the Delicious cloud in the right-hand colmumn.

Bees are a fundamental part of sustainable agriculture. Bees and other pollinating insects are responsible for the pollination of more than 80% of crops in Europe. So it’s been extremely worrying to see a mass decline in them over the past years. It’s got to such a critical point that this year the EU has funded a nine-month research project to better understand the problem and investigate the potential cause.

We recently spoke to Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle, Executive Director of The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which was set up by the European Union in 2002 as an “an independent source of scientific advice and communication on risks associated with the food chain”. Ms Geslain-Lanéelle told us about EFSA’s remit, workload and resources; and went on to emphasise the importance of science in the agency’s work, and the difficulties involved in balancing the health of farmers and the need for farmer to be able to deal with pests.