I don’t know how many of you, dear readers, are cabinet ministers, members of Parliament or pesticide manufacturers. I don’t know how many of you live in what people who don’t mind the odd cliché call the Westminster Bubble, though I can hazard a guess. One of our local papers reported an unfair dismissal case involving an MP a couple of years ago. His assistant had been unfairly dismissed, her lawyers claimed, while the MP was quite fairly dismissed by means of a recall petition. During the tribunal hearing the MP denied allegations of "banging" his fist against a filing cabinet during an altercation over an expenses issue and also denied having said "I thought the whole point of becoming an MP was to get rich”.’
So while corruption scandals have been recent news, and the news of the European Football Super League has failed to drive corruption stories from our minds and from our newspapers, I’ve been thinking about corruption in farming, and I’m able to assure you that there are excellent opportunities for corruption in agriculture for those who may be forced out of the heady bubble mentioned above. When I use the word ‘corruption’ I don’t just mean ‘dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery’. My definition would start from an assumption that in a civilised state we should all care about the welfare of our fellow human beings and about the welfare of the planet. We may not always be able to do this as well as we might like, but for those who knowingly do the opposite for cash I think corruption is the word. For example, although we had known about the ill effects of smoking since 1953, Mrs Thatcher chose on leaving office to sign up as a consultant to Philip Morris the cigarette manufacturers at a salary of $350,000 a year for three years advising them on how to avoid tobacco restrictions. If you think that’s not corrupt I suggest you get your coat.
At the top of the hierarchy of agricultural corruption there is of course lobbying, which would be perfectly reasonable if it was simply a way of trying to get our opinions across to our MPs. ‘The problem is what happens in practice: lobbying as it occurs within the context of the sophisticated influence industry that has existed in the UK for half a century or more. Lobbying is dominated by commercial interests that, for financial gain and through various means, are able to bend our system of government to their will to such an extent that it can be said to no longer serve the interests of the wider public. Viewed from this angle, lobbying appears to be a corrupting force that undermines democracy’ (The Guardian, link below). In this context it would be a waste of time to illustrate how chemical companies in particular lobby on behalf of their products. I think we can take it for granted that they do, and that they are not motivated by concern for the environment, and only by concern for fellow human beings who have shares in the company.
These companies are likely to be prepared to go to great lengths to improve the public perception of their products. Some of the most striking manipulations were revealed in a court of law in a lawsuit in the USA brought by a groundsman who claimed to have developed cancer as the result of using Roundup: : ‘One of the key outcomes of the Johnson trial in the US was the discovery that Monsanto had supressed research which highlighted potential links between glyphosate and cancer; had sponsored academics to deliver studies favourable to Monsanto; had written research papers on behalf of academics which suggested that glyphosate was safe (known as ‘ghost writing’); and used this body of evidence to lobby regulators in the US and EU that glyphosate was considered to pose no hazard to health. As a result, many employers will still believe that glyphosate is completely safe to use, as there is nothing from the manufacturer suggesting otherwise.’ (link below).
The pesticides used in the UK have been approved at a European level, and so far after Brexit nothing much seems to have changed here yet, although a recent Guardian article claimed that ‘ researchers from the University of Sussex uncovered a significant weakening of the pesticide approval process as part of the changes under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2019, and a risk that the role of scientific evidence in pesticide regulation could be watered down’ in the UK.
Part of the background to the pesticide approval process is the monolithic – and untrue – orthodoxy that pesticides are essential to food production, a view encouraged by the manufacturers, although the UN disagrees. (Link below).Approval processes are inevitably also skewed by the failure of the industry to develop pesticides that selectively target a supposedly harmful organism and nothing else. These are broad spectrum poisons. You can’t even be sure that fungicides won’t kill bees, for example, This means that anyone who accepts the dogma that pesticides are essential for crop production has also to accept that they will kill or harm a lot of other organisms, so that the task of approval of pesticides has to include approval of the destruction of many other organisms, and the problem then becomes how much damage is tolerable. Here of course the manufacturers’ Safety Data Sheets are very ‘helpful’. These are compiled by the manufacturers; they list side effects and the harm that their products do to non-target organisms. (These would be better called Hazard Data Sheets, of course). The manufacturers can design tests that are more likely to give the results that they want, or they can decide not to reveal inconvenient results. And although the European process of pesticide approval involves scientists, it seems to base the scientific approval on an assessment of the evidence supplied by the manufacturers, although as was revealed in the Roundup court case above, the chemical companies have been shown to be willing to deceive.
The result is the kind of pesticide rollercoaster I have described elsewhere, for example with DDT. Proper assessment of the risks of pesticides tends to depend, as far as I can ascertain, not on a rigorous and independent scientific initial approval, but an approval process based on evaluation of evidence supplied by the manufacturers followed by a long process of trial and error during which a great deal of harm can be done to the environment. Neonicotinoid pesticides were first patented in 1985, and it was not until 2008 that Germany unilaterally revoked the authorisation as the result of years of protest from beekeepers and environmentalists. The European Commission then waited until 2012 to ask the European Food Safety Agency to investigate. They reported that the industry-sponsored science upon which regulatory agencies' claims of safety have relied may be flawed and contain data gaps not previously considered. In other words, the Safety Data Sheets had been taken on trust and had been eventually shown to be flawed. Their review concluded, "A high acute risk to honey bees was identified from exposure via dust drift for the seed treatment uses in maize, oilseed rape and cereals. A high acute risk was also identified from exposure via residues in nectar and/or pollen’. After years of indecision and partial restrictions all neonicotinoids were banned in Europe in 2018, and yet the UK flirted with lifting the ban in certain cases in 2020. Thirty five years of damage to the environment and huge profits to the manufacturers.
Appropriately at ground level we have the farmer, a member of our one of our three hereditary professions, alongside royals and a peer or two. None of these professions require qualifications, but the farmer’s potential to harm the environment is way greater than that of the others, unless they moonlight as farmers, which many lords and royalty do, of course. Farmers often have had very little training; they are likely to rely on inherited knowledge, whatever they pick up from other farmers or from reading farming papers that depend on advertising for much of their revenue, or what they are told by agronomists. Agronomists advise farmers, but their advice is far from impartial. They tend to be in the pay of agrochemical companies and to get commission based on the quantities of chemicals they can persuade farmers that they need, so they have a vested interest in the belief that farming and food production needs chemical inputs. Argonomist is almost always a scientific sounding name for farm chemical salesperson; if they have had any training it will tend to concentrate on ‘crop protection and crop nutrition’, which translates as pesticides and fertilisers, products which can be sold to the farmer and on which lucrative commissions can be paid. At least 50% of agronomists are employed by farm chemical companies, (see link below) and I have no way of knowing how many of the independent agronomists also get commission. The usual training for an agronomist seems to be dominated by an organisation called BASIS, whose courses are also available at agricultural colleges such as Harper Adams. According to the contradictory statement on their own website ‘ BASIS is an independent standards setting and auditing organisation for the pesticide, fertiliser and allied industries….established by the pesticide industry in 1978’. It also appears to be connected to a registered charity called BASIS Registration with annual accounts showing income over £1 million which I doubt they earn by rattling tins in shopping centres. Why an outfit started by the pesticide industry to provide certification to people using pesticides can claim charitable status might be something for a proper journalist to investigate.
I am not saying that there are no proper independent agronomists out there, and it speaks volumes that all those claiming to be independent that I can find on the internet go to great lengths to distance themselves from agronomists who are paid commission. As far as I can see, from looking at farming forums and other sources on the internet, agronomists are mainly in bed with the agrochemicals industry, and overwhelmingly linked to large scale arable cropping where the inputs of chemicals are highest. They do not seem to advise livestock farmers, possibly because the commissions to be earned are less attractive.
An acquaintance recently told me of a farming friend who wished to reduce chemical inputs but could not find an agronomist in the UK who could or would advise him. Eventually he had to hire a French agronomist.
The links below may be helpful to those wishing to check my assertions and follow up these themes. You may need to copy and paste some of them as my computer skills are a bit patchy.
." (https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/chris-davies-expenses-conservatives-mp-17403853
(https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-07-19-mn-4763-story.html
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/20/commercial-lobbying-greensill-public-interest
(https://www.france24.com/en/20200721-bayer-loses-roundup-weedkiller-appeal-in-us-court),
https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2016/09/22/neonicotinoids-bayer-syngenta-bees/
Hi Richard - great article - it brought back memories of another chemical, now thankfully banned, that was used widely in my youth- paraquat. Paraquat has been banned here since 2008 - this article ( 2007)demonstrates the NFU's reluctance to ban it ,https://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/court-bans-paraquat-use- ; however the UK is the largest producer and exporter of paraquat as can be seen here https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/10/toxic-pesticides-banned-for-eu-use-exported-from-uk ....Pat Gordon
Thanks for another great article Richard.