Indicating the impact?

Indicators of pesticide impact are being increasingly used as a tool by those working on environmental and social development. A consultation paper of the UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) calls for comments, and suggests some indicators for pesticides. Alexis Vaughan investigates progress.

The Agenda 21 agreement of the 1992 Earth Summit encouraged the use of indicators by local and national governments to assess performance towards sustainability. 
    Indicators could be used to guide policies aiming to reduce the impacts of pesticide use. A potentially effective policy mechanism for addressing certain environmental problems is the use of economic instruments, which has many advantages over environmental regulations(1). An example would be a differentiated tax which encourages a shift towards products with a lower environmental impact(2) (see page 8). To achieve this, pesticides need to be classified into groups, according to the degree of their impact(3). There have been numerous studies in the classification of pesticides as reported in Pesticides News(4) by the RSPB(5) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Japan(6). Indicators would guide the information on trends in pesticide use and impact.
    Sustainable development indicators (SDIs) reveal trends and can measure the success of previous or current policies. Two main types of pesticide SDIs exist: measurements of use and of their impact.
    The quantity of pesticides applied needs careful consideration. As active ingredients  have become more biologically active, the volume applied has decreased. The following factors need to be considered: area of spray, type of crop sprayed, frequency of applications, and type of pesticide used. In isolation, these indicators may be meaningless and therefore a combination is required.

Impact
Pesticide impacts may be both direct and indirect. In the UK, the indirect effects are of most concern, especially with regard to the biodiversity of farmland wildlife. Many bird populations have plummeted in the past 20-30 years: tree sparrow populations have dropped by 89%, bullfinch by 76% and linnet by 52%(7). The grey partridge population has fallen by 82%(8) and this has been proved to be as a result of the indirect effects of pesticides(9). Despite the general lack of good data the Joint Nature Conservation Committee concluded that "there are temporal associations between trends in pesticide use (measured by the percentage of cropped area sprayed) and the periods of rapid decline of many of the declining bird species"(10). This provides an appropriate and popular indicator revealing the impact of pesticide use but also highlights the need for more data gathering. Other measurements of the indirect effects of pesticides can include populations of insects, number of plants in farmland areas and even incidences of pest resistance. 
    Concentrations and types of pesticides can be measured in drinking water, non-drinking water and groundwater and need to be location specific. Concentrations can also be measured in food, animals and humans, and incidents of adverse health effects in humans recorded.

Who is working on indicators?
To look more closely at food related indicators, the Sustainable Agriculture Food and Environment (SAFE) Alliance has developed the European Food and Environment Indicators Project, in partnership with other European organisations, L'Alliance (France), Aliança para Defesa do Mundo Rural Português (Portugal) and Plataforma Rural (Spain). 
    The OECD has been working for the past six years to develop agri-environment indicators. The pesticides section in its publication entitled Environmental Indicators for Agriculture(11) has only looked at their classification for economic policy use. 
    Organisations in the UK developing indicators (mainly SDIs) include all local authorities, English Nature, the Countryside Commission, and the UK Round Table on Sustainable Development. The then Department of the Environment produced a set of indicators in 1996(12). These were re-examined by the renamed Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) in its consultation document, Opportunities for Change(13). The DETR is also trying to develop a set of seven national 'headline' indicators.

MAFF consultation
The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) recently issued a consultation paper(14) on sustainable development indicators for agriculture, and proposes to publish a set of indicators which will measure agriculture's contribution to sustainable development. 
    The MAFF paper proposes 35 indicators, of which six relate to pesticide use. Each indicator is based on a set of sustainable development themes, such as "pollution is avoided or reduced to levels which the environment can bear". The report divides indicators into state (measure what is there); driving force (the cause of the changes in agriculture); and response (actions taken in response to the various conditions). The consultation intended to concentrate on driving force and response indicators, though state indicators are included where useful. 
    This is certainly a welcome exercise and one which deserves attention by organisations concerned with the impact of agriculture on the environment. However, the proposed indicators appear to have been developed from existing data, rather than encouraging the collation of new data. 
    Furthermore, many of the proposed MAFF indicators are relatively meaningless. For example an indicator on 'spray area' does not provide details of the type or toxicity of the pesticide, the area of set-aside or the type of crop sprayed. Links between relevant indicators are needed, for example bird populations, number of organic farms and pesticide-use indicators. There is no mention of the indirect impact of pesticides on wildlife. More use could also be made of the suggested state, driving force and response categories.

Conclusion
The classification of indicators would play a major role in the development of pesticide policies. SDIs can also reveal how effective policies are in reducing the impact of pesticides. Furthermore the data from SDIs could contribute to the classification of pesticides and vice versa. 
    The MAFF indicators are a welcome starting point, but we need more sophisticated and detailed indicators which measure the true impacts of pesticide use. Identifying ideal pesticide indicators, working out how to construct and present them, and putting in place schemes to collect the relevant data must be priority actions in order to facilitate both the use and monitor of economic instruments such as taxes.

References
1. Economic Instruments for Environmental Policy, OECD, Paris, 1997.
2. Rayment, M., Bartram, H. and Curtoys, J., Pesticide Taxes, RSPB, Sandy, Beds, 1998.
3. Ibid.
4. Pesticides News 33 p6, 34 p7, 37 p14, 39 p8.
5. Falconer K, Classification of Pesticides According to Environmental Impact, RSPB, Sandy, 1998.
6. Development of a Pesticide Use Indicator: Progress Report from Japan, Joint Working Party, OECD, 1996.
7. Campbell, L. H. and Cooke, A. S. (eds.), The indirect effects of pesticides on birds, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Peterborough, 1997.
8. Ibid.
9. Potts, G. R., The Partridge: pesticides, predation and conservation, London, Collins, 1986.
10. Op. cit. 7.
11. Environmental Indicators for Agriculture, OECD, 1997.
12. Indicators of Sustainable Development for the UK, Department of Environment UK, London, 1996.
13. Opportunities for Change, DETR, 1998.
14. Development of a set of indicators for sustainable agriculture in the UK, MAFF.

Alexis Vaughan is the Project Co-ordinator for the European Food and Environment Indicators Project at the SAFE Alliance (a non-government organisation representing 33 member bodies), Tel +44 (0)171 837 8980.

 [This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 41, September 1998, page 15]