SteB1 26 June 2014 11:22am This comment has been chosen by Guardian staff because it contributes to the debate Recommended 23 The exemption, which the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairsis considering, would see the treatment of oilseed rape seeds growing across 186,000 hectares of UK farmland. The reason this is so reckless and wrong is simple. Oilseed rape is a plant that attracts lots of wild pollinators. This level of planting will poison a massive amount of pollinators. It has been shown that neonicotinoids can remain in the ground and get into the water. Also whats the bet that Syngenta, the NFU, Bayer and Defra will try to subsequently argue the moratorium had little effect and therefore needs to be lifted. Even though they themselves broke it. However, the most serious problem here is the complete irrationality and poor thinking involved. I have seen this pollinator decline with my own two eyes because by coincidence I was photographing pollinators during this period and saw this decline happening. Wildflowers that used to be very attractive to pollinators, and in good weather were crawling with pollinators, now hardly have any pollinators. It really has been a massive problem. Unfortunately it is also a problem that has largely gone unnoticed because no one was monitoring wild pollinator numbers. Very few people observe and recognise wild pollinators and so although the problem was real and incredibly serious, it has largely gone undocumented. It is irrational thinking because we are hugely reliant on wild pollinators. But farming the industry that hugely profits from wild pollinators just takes them for granted. It appears that farmers just take wild pollinators for granted because they dont have to pay for them. Many farmers appear to know and care even less about wild pollinators. Yet they appear to worship insecticides and pesticides in general as some form of magic, simply because it costs money, and was designed by men in white coats. It is simply lazy thinking. The farming industry saw the initial effects of these agro-chemicals and decided they must be magic. But much of these early effects soon wore off. Unfortunately the farming industry doesnt seem to have noticed the rapid drop off in the effectiveness of pesticides and they are just mindlessly applying them. This is the thing, these toxic chemicals are applied anyway, and not in direct response to a problem. Their use is mindless and unthinking. Likewise the adverse impacts of these toxic compounds is invisible to the modern farmer who simply no longer recognise the wild flowers and wild pollinators they poison with their noxious pesticides. The decline of wild bees and other pollinators may be an even more alarming threat to crop yields than the loss of honeybees, a worldwide study suggests, revealing the irreplaceable contribution of wild insects to global food production. Scientists studied the pollination of more than 40 crops in 600 fields across every populated continent and found wild pollinators were twice as effective as honeybees in producing seeds and fruit on crops including oilseed rape, coffee, onions, almonds, tomatoes and strawberries. Furthermore, trucking in managed honeybee hives did not replace wild pollination when that was lost, but only added to the pollination that took place. theguardian/environment/2013/feb/28/wild-bees-pollinators-crop-yields The main problem is the power of the farming lobby, and the agro-chemical industry. They are far too close to government, politicians, and they have undue influence. This influence is undoubtedly corrupt because there is so much money sloshing around in this sector, and this is what it is all about. It is utterly corrupt because it is against the public interest. Exactly what plans do the farming and agro-chemical have for the event of a collapse of wild pollinators and Honeybees? This is what exposes this reckless madness endangering the public and why it needs to stop. The farming industry is gearing up to take advantage of high food prices. This is not in the public interest. Very few wild pollinator populations are being monitored now, and we have no baseline surveys to even guess how much they have fallen by.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 11:42:29 +0000
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