07/12/2014
It is odd that I, and now Booker, should appear to be battling on behalf of pesticide manufacturers, with our espousal of their complaints about the banning of the neonicotinoid pesticides.
In many ways, as multinational giants responsible for products that have to potential to do great harm as well as good, they represent all that is bad about corporate industry. But even these companies deserve fair treatment, despite having denied it to many others.
But, in what has already been hailed by Forbes magazine as a new "Climategate", Booker records
last week's revelation of a document showing that a campaign which last year pushed the EU into a damaging ban on certain insecticides was deliberately engineered, on the basis of highly questionable evidence, by a group of environmentally committed scientists working for a green pressure group, the International Union for Conservation in Nature (IUCN).
The point, of course, is that bringing a new pesticide to market is expensive â each different product costing about £150 million â of which about £90 million is absorbed in the development phase, much of it spent in obtaining "market authorisation" under Regulation (EC)
No 1107/2009.
The ban on the use of neonicotinoides in December last year, therefore, has been very costly to the chemical giants that produced them, but it has also done huge damage to agriculture all over Europe. An
official EU report estimates the cost to British farmers alone at £630 million.
But â as we reported
earlier, it emerges that IUCN was funded by the EU itself to the tune of £19 milllion, with £350,000 going specifically to a "task force", headed by an environmentalist who was one of the co-founders of the Dutch WWF, to come up with the evidence needed to justify a ban.
Minutes of the task force's first meeting in 2010 show that its only purpose was to find evidence to support a ban. Since 2004 neonics have been successfully used to control crop damage by farmers in 120 countries. On the back of papers produced by the task force, other green lobby groups â some also funded by the EU - launched a Europe-wide campaign calling for a ban, particularly focussed for propaganda purposes on the damage these chemicals were purportedly doing to bees.
When the Commission accordingly proposed its ban, few questioned it more strongly than the chief scientific adviser to the UK's Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which was why opposition to it in Brussels was led by his minister Owen Paterson. Defra's own field trials had shown no damage to bees, whereas the IUCN relied only on highly artificial laboratory experiments.
Paterson had no firmer ally than his Hungarian counterpart, whose own scientists had shown that, despite extensive use of neonics on two million hectares of oil seed rape, maize and sunflowers, honey yields had not fallen at all.
But the IUCN's "science" carried the day, with the result that across Britain farmers have been reporting the loss of up to 30 percent or more of their oil seed rape crop. The irony is that one of the advantages of neonics was that they were much less environmentally damaging than the pesticides they replaced, such as organo-phosphates.
This is yet another example of the bizarre symbiosis the EU has established with green pressure groups, as it showers out hundreds of millions of euros a year for them to lobby it for the all-too often destructive policies they want.
Among those who fell for the dubious science behind this particular ban was David Cameron. In their final tetchy interview last July he raised it as one of his chief reasons for sacking Mr Paterson: easily the best-informed and most effective Defra minister we've ever had.
Paterson himself referred to this country becoming a "museum of farming" if this Green tyranny continues. Already
between 1995 and 2005, the cost of bringing a new pesticide to market has risen on average by 68.4 percent. Research costs have risen by 18.0 percent, but regulatory-related costs by 117.9 percent.
As a result, the global share of new agrochemicals focussed on the European market has fallen from 33.3 percent in the 1980s to 21.3 percent in the 1990s to 16.4 percent in the 2005-14 period. The share of crop protection R&D investment has fallen from 33.3 percent in the 1980s to 25.0 percent in the 1990s to 7.7 percent in the 2005-14 period.
The money is moving to the United States, Latin America and Asia, making the Greens a luxury we cannot afford.
