Industry claims exaggerated – 
The other side of the story

‘Crop Protection in Context’ is the title of a new pamphlet from the agrochemical industry’s Crop Protection Association (CPA). John Harvey examines the claims made and fills in the gaps.

When the government put plans for a pesticides tax on hold in March this year, the agrochemical industry was given a chance to come up with its own ideas for protecting the environment.
    These voluntary alternatives to the tax have been circulated by the Ministry of Agriculture for comment(1). They have already been criticised by groups like Friends of the Earth.
    In May this year the CPA published a stout defence of chemicals, in a glossy pamphlet called Crop Protection In Context. Christopher Stopes, a member of the Advisory Committee on Pesticides (ACP) and organic farming expert, said the pamphlet ‘has severe shortcomings which the ACP will need to discuss. There is inadequate justification of the need for agrochemicals in this pamphlet.’
    It would be easy to dismiss Friends of the Earth and Mr Stopes because of their long-standing opposition to intensive farming and synthetic pesticides. But even less green, more middle-of-the-road organisations would question some of the CPA statements. Inside the front cover, the CPA says pesticides – which are called ‘crop protection products’ – are the ‘plant growing equivalent of the medicines doctors use to safeguard our own health.’ This carefully avoids one group of pesticides, the organophosphates or OPs, which are known poisons. Last year, the Committee on Toxicity published a report on OPs which said: ‘The balance of evidence supports the view that neuropsychological abnormalities can occur as a long-term complication of acute (OP) poisoning, particularly if the poisoning is severe.’(2) The difference should be obvious: medicines are supposed to make you better, pesticides can make you worse.
    This fits the tone of the CPA’s publication. On page one it claims: ‘Crop protection products protect people’s health by allowing farmers to grow enough food and help prevent starvation for the world’s ever-growing population.’ 

Pesticide ads in cotton growing area South of Lima, Peru – the industry promotes sales in developing countries where conditions of use often make safe application very difficult, if not impossible. Credit Greg Lanning

    In a recent study of transgenic crops by the Royal Society, the authors have this to say about the green revolution: ‘Despite past successes, the rate of increase of food crop production has decreased recently (yield increase in the 1970s of 3% per annum has declined in the 1990s to approximately 1% per annum). There are still heavy losses of crops owing to biotic (pests and disease) and abiotic (salinity and drought) stresses.’(3) Hunger is a result of poverty and lack of access to food. There is in fact, enough produced to feed everyone, and, given access to markets and fair prices, farmers will respond by increasing their output. To address hunger and poor nutrition, especially in rural areas, increases in local food supplies are more important than depending on high inputs and greater global food trade. 
    On page five of its pamphlet, the CPA suggests that ‘Crop protection products have a good environmental record.’ In 1994, English Nature published a statement on the use of pesticides and veterinary medicines in farming. These products, said English Nature, harm wildlife in three ways. ‘Regular use of pesticides over large areas has contributed to declines in populations of plants, invertebrates and birds dependent on agricultural habitats.’ 
    ‘Their misuse – including drift, overspraying and poor disposal of washings and spent sheep dip – damages populations of wildlife in nearby habitats. The abuse of pesticides can severely endanger certain species with small populations, such as birds of prey.’(4) On the last point, Ian Newton and colleagues at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) produced data last year showing that the number of barn owls found with anticoagulant rodenticides in their livers increased from 5% in 1983/4 to 36% in 1995/6. The figures are based on autopsies on 717 dead barn owls found all over Britain. As resistance to the poisons rises among rats, they transfer an increasing toxic load to those birds of prey which have fed on them. An autopsy on a red kite fledgling which left its nest in the Midlands during 1998 showed it had been killed by bromadiolone after eating a rodent.
    Today, English Nature’s agriculture officer, Jim Dixon, says there is another issue concerning how pesticide toxicity is tested: ‘The companies work with laboratory animals such as quails, rats and mice and fish. They try to be as representative as they can, but they probably only test between five and 10 of each species. That’s very different from using that chemical on a field of, say, 1,500 invertebrate species, 25 bird species and 15 mammals.’ Then there is the way in which pesticide use has changed so that chemicals have effects on non-target species. ‘Thirty years ago, insecticides might have been used on a few per cent of fields: by the 1990s, the figure was close to 100%. In other words, almost the whole cropped area was sprayed at least once. With fungicides, the figure was under 50% of fields 30 years ago: by the 1990s, it was close to 300%. So a bug in a field which used to have a five-out-of-ten chance of not being sprayed with a fungicide is now likely to be hit three times.’
    On almost every one of the CPA’s broad assertions, it is possible to be critical. But it is what the Association has left out that is even more striking. Resistance to pesticides is one of the biggest challenges facing intensive arable farmers and their chemical company suppliers – but the subject does not merit a mention. The July issue of Business, the quarterly magazine of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), contains short articles under the heading ‘Sustainable approaches to controlling pests and diseases.’(5) Not one of these recommends that farmers should bombard pests and diseases with any of the chemicals on offer from the CPA’s members. 
    The same issue of Business cites research on the peach potato aphid by a team at the Institute of Arable Crops Research (IACR), Rothamsted, that has found at least four different resistance mechanisms to conventional insecticides in this one species(6). ‘As a result, growers run the risk of running out of effective control agents,’ says IACR. ‘However, the good news is that the prevalence of resistance in an aphid population decreases in the absence of insecticide use.’ In other words, cutting pesticide use can reduce resistance – but this idea is not touched on by the CPA, even though it ties in with government policy.
    There is a reason for this: a large lump of tax-payers’ money funds the BBSRC. Tax-payers have concerns about pesticides, and the government wants the BBSRC to respond to those concerns in its research. BBSRC institutes are trying to find ways of controlling pests and diseases by avoiding – or reducing – the use of pesticides. There is a phrase for it ‘pesticides minimisation’ and it is part of government policy. Reducing the use of pesticides is not in the interests of CPA members. 
    In a discussion paper from the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions published in 1998, this statement appeared: ‘The government is currently exploring whether more could be done, possibly by non-regulatory means, to minimise pesticide usage and consequent damage to the environment.’(7) To take the pesticide minimisation policy further, promote responsible pesticide use – and to try to resolve some of the controversial issues touched on by the CPA – the government set up the Pesticides Forum in 1996 to promote responsible pesticide use. The Forum is completely ignored. The CPA’s boss, Dr Anne Buckenham, is a Forum member.
    She will be familiar with many of the Forum’s discussions – such as the indirect effects pesticides can have on birds by reducing their food supply. The CPA has put a positive spin on the indirect effects argument with the heading ‘Spraying to save the birds.’ The article says: ‘British Trust for Ornithology research has shown that spraying is the best choice for at least one species, reed buntings. Their study proved that whilst all the nestlings in a sprayed crop (of oilseed rape) survived, not one of the chicks in the cut crop lived.
    ‘They felt that this was probably because spraying the crop gave the birds 15 extra days to fledge prior to harvest and they suggested that over 50% of reed buntings’ second broods might be saved in this way.’ Dr Jeremy Greenwood, the BTO’s director, acknowledges that this summary is correct, but is ‘a little bald’ on its own. ‘Most of the research that we are doing on farmland birds shows that most of the species which are farmland specialists went down dramatically in numbers during the Seventies and Eighties and some have continued to decline since. That pattern is associated with the big period of agricultural intensification.’
    For example, pre-emergence herbicides have allowed farmers to switch from spring to winter wheat. ‘Farmers rarely grow spring wheat in the east of the country now and there is less land in bare fallow or stubble over the winter,’ said Dr Greenwood. ‘That used to be an important habitat for farmland birds in the winter.’
    The indirect effects argument has been published, but the CPA only makes a passing reference to it. ‘The case which was put forward by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee in 1997 on the indirect effects of pesticides is incontrovertible. In the last 20 to 25 years, ever more refined and powerful herbicides and pesticides have been developed,’ said Dr Greenwood.
    Other, more subtle, indirect effects have yet to be fully understood. It looks as though the corn bunting and yellow hammer have suffered because they tend to feed on larger weed seeds which are no longer so plentiful. ‘Perhaps this is due to changes in the timing of cereal sowing,’ said Dr Greenwood. 
    The CPA writes: ‘ Increasingly, wildlife experts have come to realise that it is the hedges and edges of the fields that are the most important for biodiversity rather than the cropped areas. Over 90% of farmland biodiversity is found there. This holds true whether or not crop protection products are used in the crop.’
    There is no reference for the 90% figure – and another member of the Pesticides Forum, Dr Nick Sotherton, research director for the Game Conservancy Trust, does not recognise it: ‘Something more than 50% would be reasonable. There is a great deal of biodiversity at the edge of the crop, but it depends how they define it: does it stop at the bottom of the hedge?
    ‘If you accept 90%, the remaining 10 % of biodiversity in the crop does include a lot of important species such as the skylark and lapwing. Making changes at the crop edge won’t make much difference to their biodiversity action plan status.’ Dr Sotherton’s work with colleagues at the Game Conservancy concluded over 25 years that there was a link between the decline in grey partridge numbers and pesticide use. That direct link is not there yet for any other species, he says – except, perhaps, the corn bunting.
    Even if you accept all the CPA’s reassurances about pesticides and wildlife, their statements about people leave many questions unanswered. In a section about safeguards to ensure that people are not exposed to pesticides, the CPA mentions long-term monitoring of the health of workers who make chemical products: ‘Through their work, these people are more likely to be exposed to higher doses of pesticides than you or I will ever be – and yet there is no evidence of any ill-effects from the products they handle.’ Professor Andrew Watterson is part of the Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group at Stirling University, and he said: ‘I am not aware of any major epidemiological studies of UK pesticide production worker morbidity that could conclusively prove or disprove the safety of many pesticides used in manufacture.’ 
    The conditions of use of hazardous pesticides in developing countries have far-reaching consequences on the health of those exposed. The World Health Organisation estimates that 200,000 suffer acute poisoning each year and 20,000 may die – mainly in developing countries. In the year 1999-2000 cotton growing season in Benin, at least 70 people died as a result of exposure to one pesticide (see PN48, p.17).
    The point about worker exposure is an obvious one for the CPA to make – but again, their evidence is lacking. ‘There is an enormous difference between ‘negative epidemiological studies’ that cannot prove or disprove adverse effects of pesticides and epidemiological studies that establish no risks from pesticides,’ said Professor Watterson. ‘Most of the UK studies cited by the agrochemical industry fall into the former and not the latter category.’ He added: ‘There are a number of studies and quite a consensus that soft tissue carcinomas are linked to herbicide manufacture.’ Perhaps the CPA is unaware of this.

References
1. A Partnership Approach to Minimising the Environmental Impacts of Crop Protection Chemicals, British Agrochemicals Association, April 2000, 70pp.
2. Organophosphates, Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment, UK, November 1999, p.91.
3. Transgenic Plants and World Agriculture, Royal Society, UK, July 2000, p.5.
4. The Use of Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines in Agriculture, English Nature, December 1994, p.1.
5. Business, BBSRC, July 2000, pp.16-17.
6. Ibid. p.20.
7. Sustainable Production and Use of Chemicals, Department of Environment, Transport and Regions, 1998, p.30.

John Harvey is a writer and broadcaster on farming issues.

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No.49, September 2000, p14]