The EU has outlined its ambition to slash in half the use and risk of chemical pesticides in its flagship food policy, the Farm to Fork strategy, by 2030.
The move has proven controversial, with stakeholders questioning both the direction of travel and whether farmers had the tools to get there.
But for Linda Field, a leading insect molecular biologist and professor emerita at Rothamsted, the longest-running agricultural research institute in the world, such targets can sometimes be a ‘good thing’ because “it galvanises things into action”.
Despite this potential, alternative pest control methods “aren’t really coming through and they’re getting stuck in research labs”, she said.
“There’s all this pest control for free out there, and we’re not using it properly for farmers,” she said, lamenting the fact that there’s “a lot in the research pipeline, but it’s not getting out of the pipeline”.
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But while the technology [for example RNA interference] has demonstrable potential, it has been ‘temporarily dropped’ by many companies which “initially showed quite a lot of interest” – something Cook puts down to maladapted regulation unable to cope with new innovations.
