Report shows higher than ever yields in post-neonic UK
February 17, 2015
From Dr. Dave Goulson's blog about this report:
In the run up to the vote on a EU-wide moratorium on use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops, which came about because of a growing body of scientific evidence that they were doing significant harm to bees, the agrochemical industry produced glossy documents declaring that this moratorium would cause massive reductions in crop yields, huge job losses in the agriculture sector, etc. etc.. You can read one such report here: http://www.hffa.info/files/wp_1_13_1.pdf This tells us that, if the moratorium were to go ahead, “the EU could lose 17 billion EUR and more; 50 thousand jobs could get lost economy-wide; and more than a million people.. would certainly suffer..”. They wanted us to believe that farmers couldn’t grow crops without these chemicals.
As you probably know, the moratorium went ahead, though the UK voted against it, presumably won over by such arguments. Now we are in the second year of the moratorium, we can start to evaluate whether this was true. Annual spring-sown crops that were sown in 2014 without neonics (sunflower and maize) have now been harvested. And the yields? Across the EU, which includes regions with a broad range of climates, yields were HIGHER that the five year average, in some regions more than 25% higher. You can see this for yourself at: http://mars.jrc.ec.europa.eu/mars/Bulletins-Publications - have a look at the December 2014 Bulletin[1]. Whatever happened to the crop devastation predicted by industry? It now starts to look like a lot of hot air and bull***t.
