Pesticide Information

Agriculture is not what it used to be, it grew-up; it became more efficient, increasingly precise and productive, and employs a diversity of technological solutions. So things are looking good for the future of food production, right?

 

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…

Last month, researchers at the University of Illinois and the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a study that is the first to identify a single cause of the colony collapse disorder that has been killing off bees across the world. Please find below a selection of articles and blog posts on the matter published since then:

At the Forum for the Future of Agriculture (see previous posts below) we spoke to Luca Montaranella, who is with theLand Management and Natural Hazards Unit at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES). The IES is part of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Comission, its role being to provide scientific and technical support for the conception, development, implementation and monitoring of European Union policies.