Pesticide Action Network says some modern pesticides are 10,000 times more toxic than DDT, a notoriously noxious chemical that was banned for its impact on human health and the environment.
And we still don’t know the effects these cocktails of chemicals have on insect ecosystems, pointed out Nick Mole, policy officer at Pesticide Action Network UK. “Hundreds of different pesticides are used to grow food in the UK. As a result, pesticides appear in millions of different combinations in varying concentrations in our landscape. However, safety assessments are only carried out for one chemical at a time. There is little to no understanding of how these pesticides interact with one another to affect soil, water and biodiversity. Much more research needs to be undertaken to understand this properly.”
Dicks said: “The wild insects are being exposed to a very wide range of pesticides as they go about their lives. And it’s fungicide, herbicides, molluscasides, insecticides, a whole cocktail of different things. In fact, a recent European study on bumblebees, showed an average of eight different chemicals in the pollen stores collected by bumblebees, and up to 27 different pesticides being collected.”
The State of Nature report, conducted in 2023, found insect numbers crashing. “Pollinating insects (bees, hoverflies and moths), which play a critical role in food production, show an average decrease in distribution of 18% since 1970. Predators of crop pests (ants, carabid, rove and ladybird beetles, hoverflies, dragonflies and wasps) showed an average decrease in distribution of 34%”.