Browsing: Agrochemical pesticides

In the months surrounding the birth of our own republic, from 1961 to 1963, a crucial, international organisation was also being born, to assure food safety across the globe. 

As a partnership between the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations and the World Health Organisation, the Codex Alimentarius Commission produces the Codex Alimentarius, which is Latin for the ‘Book of Food’. It contains internationally recognised guidelines, standards, codes of practice and recommendations on food safety, with just two goals: to ensure the health of consumers and fair trade in food. 

Yet, today, both are under threat. 

Over the 60 years since the Codex was launched, the commission has been led by the world’s top scientists, drawing on every global study to set food safety standards that include assessing pesticides for their impact on human health. To do that, Codex sets Maximum…

There is a certain state of mind where someone is so sure something is true they consider all information as proof, and ignore everything that suggests otherwise. It is how the majority of the world’s population believed the Earth was flat long after measurements showed the curve on the planet’s surface and its changing position relative to the sun and stars. 

For, when you want to believe the Earth is flat, facts are only interference.  

And so it is with the current fashion for declaring that spraying locusts or any insects that eat part or all our crops is necessarily bad, even when there is no evidence at all that that is the case. 

Indeed, so extreme is the anti-pesticide noise that we are in danger of plundering our food output and increasing our dependency on Europe for generations ahead. Some have even have called it the new colonialism, in …