I would like to discuss the merits of organic farming and the need for greater incentives for conversion and I’m going to do so by simply pointing to a series of research articles and letting the facts speak for themselves.
In 2016 WWF published The Living Planet Report. This stated that as a result of human activity we are in the midst of the world’s 6th Mass Extinction Event. In the last 540million years five such events have happened slowly over hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of years; variously caused by climate change, changes in atmospheric composition or changes in sea levels. What is remarkable about this latest event is not only that it is happening very fast – over only a century and accelerating in the last 50 years – but also that the cause is, for the first time, a single species: homo sapiens. The report shows an average decline in global vertebrate populations of 58% between 1970 and 2012. On that trend the decline was predicted to be 67% by 2020. So in our lifetime – because there is no sign of improvement in the next one and a half years – two thirds of all fish, reptiles, birds, amphibians and mammals will have disappeared compared with 1970!
The State of Nature Report 2016 covers Great Britain and is a similar report produced by a collaboration of conservation and research organisations (WWF, RSPB, National Trust, Woodland Trust amongst many others). The report assesses about 8,000 terrestrial and freshwater species using IUCN Red List criteria. Thirteen per cent, or 1,057 species are at risk of extinction in Great Britain and two per cent, that is 142 species, are known to have gone extinct. Within this study twelve per cent of farmland species are at risk of extinction.
The State of The World’s Birds 2018 has just been published by Birdlife International. This is a global report and shows that Forty per cent of species are declining (3,967 species), only forty four per cent are stable (4,393) and a tiny seven per cent are increasing (653 species). Within this, the worst trend is amongst European Farmland species, which have declined by Sixty Four per cent since 1980.
This brings us to a 2017 report by a group of German scientists which I find to be the scariest and the most startling: Since 1989 they have monitored flying insect biomass (simply the total quantity of flying insects) over 63 nature reserves throughout Germany. They found a Seventy Five per cent decline over 27 years and a peak seasonal decline of Eighty Four per cent. This is bad news for many fish and small mammals but it is catastrophic for birds – about 60% of bird species depend on flying insects for food. It is also, obviously, very bad news for plant pollination. Butterfly losses have been well documented but this research, for the first time, includes all flying insects and it is the most comprehensive to date. The researchers did not exhaustively analyse the range of possible causes but they point to agricultural intensification and specifically pesticide use as a plausible cause.
Insect Biomass Research 2017 (Hallman et. al).
In my view these facts do speak for themselves; Pesticides are designed to kill insects and we systematically spread industrial quantities across the landscape both in Britain and in Europe. In the absence of a better and simpler explanation pesticides should be treated as the cause of the collapse in insect populations. Occam’s razor requires no less.
In September 2017 Alice Milner and Professor Ian Boyd published an article in Science Magazine entitled “Toward Pesticidovigilance”. Prof. Ian Boyd is not a controversial scientist he is Chief Scientific Advisor to DEFRA. In this article they pointed out that – like pharmaceuticals – pesticides are tested and registered for approval but unlike pharmaceuticals they are not monitored post-approval to determine unexpected effects. In the pharmaceutical context such post-approval monitoring is termed “Pharmacovigilance” and in the article they argue for “Pesticidovigilance” in other words use of pesticides should be monitored post approval. To quote their conclusion: “The effects of dosing whole landscapes with chemicals have been largely ignored by regulatory systems. This can and should be changed”. I suggest they wouldn’t propose such caution unless they thought there was something serious to worry about.
The last report on my list is from January 2017 when the UN published a report to the UN General Assembly by the “Special Rapporteur on the right to food” calling for an international treaty to regulate hazardous pesticides. The report points to the significant harms of pesticides citing “catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole.” It states that it is possible to produce healthier food with high yields without polluting and exhausting environmental resources. The report points to studies showing that “agroecology” – that is farming methods which do not use pesticides and respect ecosystems – is capable of delivering sufficient yields to feed the entire world population without these harms. They refer to the assertion that “pesticides are necessary” as “dangerously misleading”. I don’t want to go into the details of the report here but the main argument is that it is a myth that pesticides are necessary to feed the world.
Report to The UN General Assembly on the right to food
I wrote at the beginning that I wanted the facts to speak for themselves; I found many of these facts to be quite shocking. After reading these reports it seems clear that we are killing three quarters of our insect populations by spreading poisons, so it should be no surprise, with that in mind, that birds and other species higher up the food chain are in sharp decline in almost similar proportions.
My own conclusion is that we, by that I mean all of us, all of society, have a Moral Duty to farm responsibly and I believe that means organically. The precautionary principle should be applied; this requires that activities which present a plausible risk of harm should be banned until proven to be safe.
I don’t want to have to look at anybody’s grandchildren and say: “Yes, sorry all the birds are gone, I suppose we should’ve applied the precautionary principle, but it was easier and more profitable not to do so….”
So I ask you to please consider these facts next time you are discussing farming policies or buying food and to think about what measures can and should be taken to tackle these complex problems. My recommendations are: -
- Stronger control of pesticides; a ban on routine use.
- Subsidies to promote Agroecology and Organic Farming
- Support for training in alternative pest control methods (which do exist and are effective).
- Support for diverse, less intensive farms
- Support for sustainable land management practices designed to protect and encourage biodiversity.
- Promotion of Organic produce in order to avoid the harms of other production methods.
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