What do you do if there are food shortages threatened across the world, rising food prices for your own citizens and problems for your farmers? You move to ban pesticides, lower yields on your crops and increase the amount of acreage required. This is the dangerous proposal set out by the European Union, since they intend to move from a risk based to a hazard based system.
He said 80%-100% of insecticides will be banned, along with 80% of fungicides. According to the UK Pesticides Safety Directorate, up to 15% of all products will be deregistered, with a further 25% needing to be replaced over the next five years.
Mr Parry estimates the ban will cut yields 20% and gross margins 37%, requiring an extra 500,000ha across Europe to make good the loss in food production.
“But the European Parliament itself estimates a drop in yields of 39%-40%, and 79% lower gross margins. In this scenario, we’ll need 1.5m hectares of extra land,” he added.
The new rules will also allow the Commission to ban food products from other countries on the ground that residual amounts of presticide will be included. Sarkozy's disgusting inversion of agricultural protection and saving the lives of the poor in other countries is now revealed for the lie that it is: in reality, the EU uses its tariffs and regulations to impoverish its own citizens and keep farmers in Africa, Asia or Brazil poor.
We are now in a thought experiment: how long can a polity infected by the institutional equivalent of mad cow disease survive?