Typical English roast dinner potentially ‘drenched’ in 102 pesticides, says report | Pesticides
It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon in early summer and you’ve stopped for lunch at the pub. A waiter places a roast served with carrots, peas, parsnips, potatoes and onion gravy, then pudding, strawberries and cream. It’s like the perfect rustic meal to accompany a day in the countryside.
However, a Greenpeace report released Thursday reveals that ingredients in the traditional Sunday roast have potentially been treated with a cocktail of more than 100 pesticides. Data from the Fera survey on pesticide use for 2024 shows that 102 – including seven banned in the EU – were used on seven categories of vegetables and soft fruits.
These roast potatoes may have been sprayed with benthiavalicarb, a fungicide banned in the rest of Europe because it causes cancer. They may also have been given a pinch of metribuzin, a herbicide banned because it is an endocrine disruptor.
The carrots may have been treated with the insecticide spirotetramat, whose EU authorization has expired and which can kill bees and fish. Peas are often treated with the herbicide S-metolachlor, which poses risks to mammals and has been implicated in groundwater contamination.
And those strawberries may have been sprayed with clofentezine, dimethomorph and mepanipyrim, all banned in the EU because they have been identified as endocrine disruptors and can have harmful effects on human and animal hormones.
Not only were crops sprayed with a range of pesticides, Greenpeace found, but many were dosed multiple times. “Our countryside is awash in pesticides, with devastating consequences for bees, birds, butterflies, rivers and soil,” said Nina Schrank, campaigner at Greenpeace UK.
“Fields that once teemed with wildlife are falling silent as agrochemical giants reap huge profits and farmers are trapped in a costly cycle of chemical dependence. »
The massive use of pesticides is devastating the natural world, according to the Greenpeace report. “The signs of the decline of nature are everywhere,” he says, highlighting the marked decline of birds, butterflies and hedgehogs.
Since the end of World War II, the use of pesticides has become common practice to control weeds, insects and fungi that harm efficient agricultural production.
“However, what we might think of as a weed can also be a wildflower that provides shelter or food for a multitude of creatures,” the report says. “Insects that eat crops are themselves food for other animals, and share fields with a multitude of species that are not the target, but are nevertheless impacted.
“As a result, our reliance on pesticides is leading to terrible, unintended consequences on entire ecosystems. »
The UK government’s National Pesticide Action Plan targets a 10% reduction in pesticide use by 2030. Greenpeace has called for a 50% reduction in use, impact and toxicity by the same date. The campaign group called on the UK to realign itself with EU standards “as a benchmark”, ban imports of food grown with unlicensed pesticides and increase the level of organic farming to at least 10%.
The National Farmers Union, which prefers to refer to pesticides as crop protection products, said many of these chemicals were only used by farmers when necessary, were “among the most regulated chemicals in the world” and without them crop yields could fall by up to 50%.
A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson said: “We impose strict limits on pesticide residue levels in food, which are set after rigorous risk assessments to ensure levels are safe for consumers. These limits apply to both food produced domestically and imported from other countries.
“Our UK National Action Plan, published last year, sets out how we will help farmers, growers and other land managers to increase their use of sustainable practices to reduce the potential harm from pesticides, while effectively controlling pests and pesticide resistance and protecting food safety.
