News • Sustainable Farming Campaign
Pesticides need bigger and better regulation
An article co-authored by Defra's Chief Scientific Officer argues that better regulation is needed to control how pesticides are used and affect the environment at a landscape scale.
The paper compares the way pesticides and pharmaceuticals are regulated. Both have individual, short-term impacts as well as long-term impacts that can be assessed in aggregate.
Unlike pesticides, pharmaceuticals are subject to long-term monitoring, known as 'pharmacovigilance'. It involves the collection, detection, assessment, monitoring, and prevention of adverse effects of pharmaceutical products. It continues throughout the lifetime of each product, building a well developed safety database for that product.
No equivalent system applies to pesticides, though the risks are comparable. The authors recommend that a form of 'pesticidovigilance' should urgently be adopted. Read the article here.
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Published Friday 29 September 2017
Sustainable Farming Campaign: Sustain encourages integration of sustainable food and farming into local, regional and national government policies.
