With Brexit looming, the UK has a choice.  We can lower our pesticide standards, thereby increasing our exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. Or we can use Brexit as an opportunity to move away from pesticides and increase support to British organic farmers. This would better protect human health and enable a genuinely-sustainable agriculture sector to flourish.

In addition to urging the UK government to provide more support to the British organic sector, PAN UK has compiled a list of ten policy recommendations for the UK Government post-Brexit. If implemented, these changes would reduce the use of pesticides and the harmful effects that such use can and does have on the people and environment of the UK.

Our policy recommendations are laid out below and further details of our proposals can be found here.

  1. Introduce clear quantitative targets for reducing the overall use of pesticides in agriculture.
  2. Ensure authorisations are based on a strict interpretation of the precautionary principle; maintain a hazard-based (rather than revert to risk-based) approach to pesticide authorisations and phase out the most Highly Hazardous Pesticides.
  3. Do not authorise, or grant re-approval for, products which pose risks to human or environmental health where safer non-chemical methods are available.
  4. Fast track authorisation of less hazardous pest management products such as bio-pesticides.
  5. Introduce strong penalties and robust enforcement to ensure that any contamination of the environment by users of pesticides – including farmers and amenity users – is dealt with properly and will act as a deterrent to misuse.
  6. Create a human health monitoring system for those that routinely work with pesticides, including farmers, farmworkers and amenity operatives and establish a reporting system for others exposed to pesticides including the general public, farming families and rural residents.
  7. Provide incentives for reducing the use of pesticides and establish a proper monitoring system for pesticide use based on frequency of application.
  8. Introduce a Pesticide Levy and use the revenue raised to support programmes to help farmers reduce pesticide use.
  9. Establish a new body for monitoring pesticide use and enforcing pesticide regulations which is separate from the body that deals with pesticide authorisations
  10. Introduce greater transparency to allow independent scrutiny of toxicological and other data prior to authorisation of any active substance or formulation in order to break the undue influence of agrochemical companies.