Thursday, 30th October 2008

Jeffrey Titford MEP objects to a new EU directive that will instruct British farmers on which pesticides they can use.

Well on their way through the European Parliament are the EU's proposals for an update to the directive covering the use of pesticides. This involves the introduction of a new hazard-based system for approving pesticides to replace the tried and tested existing regime, which is based on risk.

This misguided legislation typifies the EU’s approach to law making – fix it, even if it isn’t broken. What it means for farmers is the loss of many of the chemical tools they have used for years to tackle some of the most pernicious weeds and blights. It is good to see that the farming industry is belatedly waking up to the extreme threat this legislation poses to the arable sector.

Efforts to resist these proposals are being aimed at the European Parliament’s Environment Committee. Farmers are being encouraged to lobby the committee by writing letters to the individual members and a petition is under way, which a number of correspondents have urged me to sign.

Unfortunately, much of this effort misses the central point and is wrongly targeted.  Decisions on what system to use for the assessment of pesticides we employ in this country should be decided by our own government at Westminster, not by unelected officials in the European Commission. The Environment Committee is only enacting the wishes of the Commission and its proposals will be rubber-stamped by the tame European Parliament.

People seem to be forgetting that what we joined in 1973 was sold to us as a "Common Market" where we would do lots of business, which would be good for the economy. Who would have believed that, 35 years later, officials at the European Commission, with no democratic legitimacy whatsoever, would be laying down the law on what chemicals we may spray on fields in Britain, while our own elected government can do nothing but stand meekly by waiting to be told what it must enforce?

If you really do want to write letters, far better to send them to Gordon Brown and Hilary Benn, urgently requesting that Britain should veto these proposals and withdraw from the Common Agricultural Policy and, ultimately, from the EU itself.  The one would inevitably lead to the other. You might copy your letters to Agriculture Commissoner Mariann Fischer Boel for good measure.

Only by taking these dramatic but necessary steps will we ever again get sensible agricultural policy in Britain.

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