12/August/22

 

We are in a biodiversity crisis, with insects particularly in trouble. Insects that were once commonplace just a few decades ago are today a rare sight. After climate change, industrial-scale agriculture, with its heavy reliance on pesticides, must take much of the blame. One obvious solution is to make farming more sustainable. The EU had a plan – its Farm to Fork (F2F) strategy – that includes a new regulation to halve pesticide use by 2030. Then came the war in Ukraine, and with fears over food security, politicians started to lose their nerve. What happens when plans for sweeping reform come up against business interests? According to Dave Goulson, Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, there are ways to reduce the need for pesticides, but this requires knowledge that farmers don’t necessarily have. “At the moment we have a farming system where most of the advice given to farmers is given to them by agronomists who work for pesticide companies,” he said. “Not surprisingly, they see pesticides as the first solution to any problem they have, often the only solution.” But there are alternatives. Mongabay

 

 

Technopolis, consultants to the European Commission, has organised a survey to solicit the views of stakeholders on the Commission's plans to deregulate certain types of GM crops. Claire Robinson of GMWatch was invited to participate in the survey and originally intended to do so, but has now refused, due to bias and failures in clarity in the survey, as well as the survey's expectation of participants to engage in "crystal ball" thinking that is not evidence-based. GMWatch

 

 

The peasant farmer organisation ECVC (European Coordination Via Campesina), which currently gathers 31 national and regional farmer, farm worker and rural organisations based in 21 European countries, has also refused to participate in the EU Commission/Technopolis survey (see above), on the grounds that the vast majority of the questions are focused on "weakening or disappearance of its [the current legislation's] requirements for risk assessment, detection, labelling and traceability for products derived from these new genetic modification techniques if they are considered to be ‘sustainable’ (without sustainability criteria being defined) or similar to products derived from traditional techniques". ECVC

 

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