Pesticide safety research shouldn't be left to the pesticide companies
Date:08-01-2014
Pesticide companies are responsible for assessing the safety of their products, writes Christopher N Connolly, Reader in neuroscience at the University of Dundee - and this situation cannot continue. The research should be carried out independently, subjected to peer review, and published.
The UK government is prepared to accept funding for studies on the risks of pesticides to bees and other pollinators from the manufacturers of the chemicals in question.
Not surprisingly, this raises uncomfortable questions about trust and transparency, as a new report from the Environmental Audit Committee points out ('Government should accept ban on pollinator-harming pesticides').
The chair of the Committee, Joan Walley MP, commented on its findings: "When it comes to research on pesticides, Defra is content to let the manufacturers fund the work. This testifies to a loss of environmental protection capacity in the Department responsible for it."
I share the Committee's concerns that the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has insufficient capacity to monitor environmental safety and to carry out the sort of urgent testing needed for these neonicotinoid pesticides. The testing demanded is limited to industry-funded field trials.
Will the fields chosen for outdoor trials reflect all fields where neonicotinoids may be used? Unlikely as most environments are complex and unique. Therefore, conclusions are hard to interpret - there are so many influencing factors including weather, disease, habitat structure and the use of other pesticides.
And despite all farmers being required by EU regulations to record their use of pesticides, this information is not collected in the UK. Without knowledge on how farmers have used pesticides, singly and combined together, a huge unknown risk exists - not just to insects, but all life.
Field studies cannot replace the lab - we need both
Lab studies simplify a problem by breaking it down into testable hypotheses, in carefully controlled experiments, with other potential varying factors removed. Field studies can control some factors, but this is at the expense of being realistic - their claimed advantage.
Alternatively, as Defra proposes, one can include other variables into the analysis. An excellent idea, but the experiments would need to be impossibly large, and one critical variable is missing - the presence of other pesticides - as Defra does not currently consider this important.
The fact is we need both laboratory and field trials, and a more rigorous understanding of what insect pollinators are important and affected, the impact of different habitats and threats, what pesticides are there and how these all interact.
The chemical companies must pay - but remain at arm's length
If the results are to be trusted by the public, the industry cannot be given control. Yet it is the pesticide chemical industry that needs the data in order to get approval for their products, for which they stand to financially benefit.
So it's obvious the industry should pay - but they must not control the research. Funds for such research should be collected by Defra and passed to research council funding agencies such as BBSRC and NERC to distribute anonymously to expert independent academic laboratories for blind testing.
The researchers should know only what is essential to conduct safety tests in the field and laboratory. Industry should also be blinded to the identity of the researchers throughout, but receive the full dataset for comment.
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