Here we go again. Greenpeace released a report last week entitled Our Poisoned Land claiming 102 individual pesticides have been used across seven groups of British food staples, namely carrots, onions, leeks, strawberries, peas, swede, turnips parsnips and potatoes. The Daily Mail once again played the role of Greenpeace’s useful idiot, and basically copied their press release into a one-sided article amplifying the activist group’s chemophobia. Here is the other side, assessing the deceptive fear-mongering tactics that has made Greenpeace a tired and largely ignored organization fighting to stay relevant.
Shoddy Reporting
The Daily Mail was one of the few mainstream media groups to cover last week’s Greenpeace report. In an article spookily entitled: “The pesticides lurking in your roast dinner: Scientists discover a cocktail of over 100 dangerous chemicals in the Sunday staple – with onions and leeks harbouring the most”, the journalist, Shivali Best, applied Chemophobia 101 rules without reserve:
- focus on the contamination of common foods eaten during a weekly family tradition,
- cite how these baddies are lurking and ready to attack you and
- stress the presumed chemical cocktail of dangerous chemicals.
Shivali Best claims the title of the Daily Mail’s “Science and Technology Editor”, but she missed the point in the very title. I suppose Greenpeace should have done a better job proofreading the final copy. It is not 100 dangerous chemicals (there are a thousand dangerous chemicals in a cup of coffee) waiting to attack us, but rather more than 100 pesticides. Perhaps a chemical and a pesticide are the same thing to a naive chemophobe. Best also warned the Daily Mail readers about the existence of “PFAs” or “forever chemicals” in your dinner (I think she meant to say “PFAS”).
Such scientific illiteracy is just what Greenpeace is looking for when they push their research garbage through the media meat grinder. But is this the best the Daily Mail can find as their “Science and Technology Editor”?
The Daily Mail article did add a small dose of reality in the reporting:
“Most samples contained pesticides residues below the maximum residue level (MRL), which is the amount legally allowed on food or in animal feed. Officials say these are set usually well below the level considered safe, applying to food both grown domestically and imported from abroad.”
But the journalist quickly questioned whether the MRL levels were actually safe, especially when other chemicals from “drinking water, plastic packaging and a range household products” were added to this apparently toxic cocktail of industrial poisons.
This tangent to all sorts of other chemical exposures was not in the Greenpeace report. Shivali Best clearly wants to be running her own anti-chemicals campaign, but her day-job pays the rent, for now.
The Methodology?
The Greenpeace report itself is only 24 pages (much like a second-year university term paper in both effort and quality) with a very simple data-gathering methodology.
Greenpeace came to its conclusions by filtering through a public database that lists all pesticides allowed for use on these seven food staples. That is all they did (as well as creating some rudimentary infographics for their media amplification). They did not explain how and when these 102 pesticides are applied, if at all. They did not compare them to the chemical usage in organic farming or to the levels of exposure found on the crops. It was merely a numbers game to create a shocking headline to feed to the chemophobic faithful.
The reality is that farmers use pesticides only if and when needed. More than risk, it is a question of time and money. If the summer is excessively damp, they will need to use fungicides to protect crops from the elements. They won’t need to use them in a dry summer. Certain areas and weather conditions leave crops prone to insect infestations, so it is good for farmers to know they have certain tools in their crop protection toolbox to use if needed.
Greenpeace isn’t interested in that reality. They want to show the number of 102 pesticides (which is really quite a small amount to protect every potential threat to seven staple crops) and claim that they are being repeatedly doused on crops, destroying the environment and causing unnecessary health risks.
The Rhetoric BINGO Card
Greenpeace packed a significant amount of emotional rhetoric into such a small report. Here are some of the NGO’s more spine-chilling classics:
“Our waters are plagued by algae, as chemicals travel far beyond farmland and leave species from kingfishers to freshwater insects facing a life-or-death struggle.”
“Everywhere we look, nature is barely hanging on. The struggles of our moths and butterflies are anything but unique. They reflect how the foundations of our environment are crumbling.”
“As well as being an ecological disaster, these fertilisers are a financial nightmare…”
“Imidacloprid and fipronil have been banned in agriculture because they are so potent, but they remain in heavy use in the UK as part of popular over-the-counter flea treatments for our millions of pet dogs and cats. A single monthly dose for a large dog is enough to kill 25 million bees.”
Wait, so treating Fido for fleas kills 25 million bees a month??? Why doesn’t Greenpeace just campaign to ban dogs (they are also a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions)? By the time a reader comes across this claim, reality has been sufficiently numbed.
The chemophobic rhetoric hasn’t changed much over the last three decades I have been watching the evolution of Greenpeace campaigns. It is, however, now no longer just fear of chemicals and pesticides poisoning our land. Almost every paragraph in the Greenpeace report was amended with the inclusion of “artificial nitrogen fertilizers” or “synthetic fertilizers”. Their anti-fertilizer campaign has to qualify the threat from synthetic or man-made fertilizers because, like pesticides, organic farming also needs to enrich the soil. Greenpeace is attacking an essential agricultural tool while assuming that natural cow dung releases no harmful chemicals into the soil and groundwater. Greenpeace wants to have their poisons and eat them too.
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So why is natural, animal-based fertilizers more preferred by these cosmopolitan zealots? According to the report, these synthetic, industrial fertilizers are just too efficient. I wish I were making this up.
“Artificial nitrogen fertilisers are very different chemicals. They boost the nutrient content of the soil far beyond natural levels, rather than killing animals and plants. But in doing so they also disrupt our environment.”
This is all about industrial agriculture, getting more from the soil, and that goes against the activist, post-capitalist orthodoxy.
It also goes against common sense and social justice.
It also goes against the goal of the report to show how seven UK food staples are dripping in pesticides. The constant references to fertilizers, their burden on the environment and their increased financial costs given the recent wars in Ukraine and Iran, shows how Greenpeace is unable to focus their campaigns on a coherent message. They just like to rant.
There were no quotes from experts or other views. Greenpeace did not attempt a balanced review and they did not consider the pesticide load on organic vegetables (which use equally toxic pesticides approved for organic farming). This is activist science – the goal is not evidence or discovery, it is about advancing a campaign.
But the NGO cannot help itself – it is in its activist DNA. But the Daily Mail should have sought out expert views beyond the prepared Greenpeace script. Shoddy journalism in the true style of the Daily Mail (one of the only media groups to cover this campaign, except for an X post from GMWatch).
The Conflation Tactic
Fear is stronger when it can be associated with other, unrelated fears. NGOs like Greenpeace saw how effective that conflation tactic could be in likening ultra-processed food production to Big Tobacco, trying to claim the same researchers are up to their old tricks. Piling fear and outrage of one known industrial malfeasance on top of the targeted scare campaign creates a perception of a relentless industry playbook to harm consumers and the environment and a complicit government to corrupt to bother to stop the continued destruction.
In this case, pesticide use is conflated with Big Tobacco and Big Oil. The report executive summary states:
“Yet for too long the government’s response has been ponderous. Agribusinesses have used tactics previously employed by tobacco and oil companies, systematically undermining scientific evidence of the damage they inflict.”
This is not about actual toxicity or risk to human health and the environment, but rather about how big business is controlling our food supply.
The NGO has also not missed the opportunity to conflate pesticides with PFAS even though the term represents over 10,000 fluorine-based formulations and the one often cited as being used in agriculture, TFA, has been determined to be harmless. But it’s PFAS, it’s a chemical, so it’s bad.
How these tired scaremongers continue to operate without critical scrutiny or public disgust is beyond me.
David Zaruk is the Firebreak editor, and also writes under the pen-name The Risk Monger. David is a retired professor, environmental-health risk analyst, science communicator, promoter of evidence-based policy and philosophical theorist on activists and the media. Find David on X @Zaruk
A version of this article was originally posted at Firebreak and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Firebreak on X @the_firebreak
