In the run up to the vote on a EU-wide moratorium on use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops, which came about because of a growing body of scientific evidence that they were doing significant harm to bees, the agrochemical industry produced glossy documents declaring that this moratorium would cause massive reductions in crop yields, huge job losses in the agriculture sector, etc. etc.. You can read one such report here: http://www.hffa.info/files/wp_1_13_1.pdf This tells us that, if the moratorium were to go ahead, “the EU could lose 17 billion EUR and more; 50 thousand jobs could get lost economy-wide; and more than a million people.. would certainly suffer..”. They wanted us to believe that farmers couldn’t grow crops without these chemicals.

As you probably know, the moratorium went ahead, though the UK voted against it, presumably won over by such arguments. Now we are in the second year of the moratorium, we can start to evaluate whether this was true. Annual spring-sown crops that were sown in 2014 without neonics (sunflower and maize) have now been harvested. And the yields? Across the EU, which includes regions with a broad range of climates, yields were HIGHER that the five year average, in some regions more than 25% higher. You can see this for yourself at: http://mars.jrc.ec.europa.eu/mars/Bulletins-Publications - have a look at the December 2014 Bulletin [1].  Whatever happened to the crop devastation predicted by industry? It now starts to look like a lot of hot air and bull***t.

Right now, there is a pitched battle in Ontario – the state government is proposing major restrictions on neonics, and the agrochemical industry are pulling out all the stops to prevent it, perhaps because they fear that other parts of North America might follow suit if Ontario go ahead. They published a full page “Open letter to Ontarians” in several major newspapers, in which they claim that neonics don’t harm bees, and that they are “vital” to farmers.  Déjà vu? Ontarians might do well to look at Europe when weighing up the truth of these claims. I for one am not inclined to believe them.  

All this also makes me wonder - what other chemicals has industry been telling farmers they need, when actually they don't? How much of pesticide use is based on evidence, and how much on marketing hype/ sales pressure?

[1] Note that oilseed rape is autumn sown so the first crop without neonics wasn’t sown until August 2014, we won’t see the yields until summer 2015]