My Lords, in leading this group, I make it clear that the wording of my amendments is inferior to that of Amendment 78, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. I will not waste time on mine discussing wind speeds and contamination, et cetera, because I hope that he will move his amendment and that it will be supported across the House in a Division. If not, I will call a Division on his amendment.
I am grateful to the Minister for arranging a most informative meeting with officials. They confirmed that, although some parts of EU regulations will be carried over into our legislation after next January, the unused powers on which nothing has yet been done will lapse.
There are three main pieces of relevant EU legislation. Regulation 1107/2009 permits individual pesticides and Regulation 396/2005 sets maximum residue levels for pesticides in food. But Directive 2009/128/EC, which sets a framework for action to ensure that pesticides are used responsibly and that alternatives are developed, is the most important here. It contains a mixture of things that member states “must” do and “may” do. The “musts” have been implemented in Great Britain through the Plant Protection Products (Sustainable Use) Regulations 2012. However, at the end of the transition period the powers in this directive that allow, but do not require, particular actions can no longer be used, because the European Communities Act 1972 will no longer be in force. So we will have a lacuna, unless the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is accepted.
Over the years, Defra has been aware of the problems. In 2017, Defra’s former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir Ian Boyd, published a paper in the journal Science entitled Toward Pesticidovigilance. This paper is a damning assessment of the regulatory approach worldwide to pesticides sprayed on crops, including that the impacts of “dosing whole landscapes” have been ignored, and that the assumption by regulators that it is “safe” to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes “is false” and must change.
Many of these chemicals are hormone disruptors. Some of them mimic oestrogens, and it has been suggested that this could account for decreased sperm motility and sperm counts and male infertility, as well as for breast, bladder, thyroid and other hormone-dependent cancers, childhood cancers and even brain malignancies.
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The other effect of many pesticides is to disrupt mitochondrial function. The mitochondria are like the engine in every cell in the body. Mitochondrial dysfunction can lead to disability and chronic illness, and it interferes with the body’s efforts to heal. Recent studies show that chemical mixtures appear to have a cumulative deleterious effect, even when no single chemical in the mix is at levels defined as toxic, meaning that the “no observed adverse effect” level and the “lowest observed adverse effect” level need to be revisited. Worse still, pesticides are handed on to the next generation in the womb. Studies of umbilical cord blood have repeatedly shown hundreds of different chemical pollutants.
Monsanto, the producer of glyphosate and now owned by Bayer, admitted carcinogenic effects for large numbers, with out-of-court settlements for malignancies, including lymphoma. It has been suggested that such settlements avoid having to disclose secret internal documents in court, which of course is what happened to the tobacco industry. To quote a former civil servant in an email on this amendment:
“I only wish now … that I had been at the time braver and more able to speak out against the mulishly aggressive intellectual dishonesty and subservience to the pesticide companies that was behind so much of what I was asked to do.”
The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, will speak to his amendment and I urge all to support it at the vote. It will plug a gap after next January. Without it, the UK will be left with a hole in its legislative framework which will be extensively exploited by the pesticide industry, to the detriment of human health and the long-term improvement of a biodiverse ecology, which is what the Bill aims to achieve. I beg to move.