A race to the bottom would be devastating for British wildlife

MILLIONS of peop l e h a v e c a mpaigned to protect British bees over the past few years. It’s a subject close to our hearts. One MP told me he got more letters from constituents about bees than on any other issue – including health and education combined.

Yet it’s only recently that politicians have acted to protect them.

Last year, following huge public pressure, the EU banned four insecticides – officially known as neonicotinoids – thought to be causing bee populations to plummet. But the future of these vital and much-loved insects is under fresh and imminent threat.

Consumers are aware that postBrexit trade deals with countries such as America, Australia and India risk abandoning the UK’s high agricultural standards as we import hormonepumped beef a nd c hi c ken washed in chlorine. But less well known is the fact that these countries still use the harmful pesticides that were banned by the EU because of their effect on insect populations.

While spraying them on foreign soils here has less of an impact, the fact is that – in the resulting ‘race to the bottom’ in welfare and environmental practices – there is every likelihood that British farmers will begin using these chemicals, too. But at what cost? There are 1,500 species of insects that pollinate plants in the UK. Killing them would lead to crop failure – and devastate all the other wildlife that depends on insects and wild plants.

THE economic value of insect pollination services to crop agriculture alone has been estimated as at least £600 million per year. When l eft unregulated, if one farmer starts using toxic chemicals, others do too. America’s farms are now 48 times more t oxic t o bees and other insects, than they were just 25 years ago and the number of insecteating birds has plummeted by more than 40 per cent.

But the dangers are more wideranging. If we allow the unfettered use of agricultural chemicals on our food sources, it is not just insects that will suffer.

Last week, The Mail on Sunday reported experts’ fears that a trade deal with the US could expose British consumers to 70 potentially harmful chemicals – some associated with cancer – that are used on US farms but banned in the UK.

The shocking report also detailed how hundreds of other pesticides are used in much greater quantities in America than here.

US grape vines, for example, are typically treated with 1,000 times the amount of an insecticide linked to problems with sexual function and fertility, while apple trees are sprayed with 400 times the level of malathion, an insecticide linked to cancer and lung problems if consumed in high quantities.

So just how dangerous are these chemicals? For a start, they do not restrict themselves to harming insects, fungi and wild plants that some people regard as pests. They don’t s i mply di s a ppear o nce applied. Instead, they have a nasty habit of finding their way into rivers, attaching themselves to sediment and staying there. We have seen this happen already.

During the late-1950s, we started using organochlorine chemicals to kill insect pests. The unintended result? Otter numbers plummeted. The worst of these substances, dieldrin, was finally banned in the late 1980s but it took a couple of decades for otter numbers to recover.

Atrazine is another toxic herbicide used abroad, and this also sticks around in water courses.

Harmful to wildlife, it damages sexual function and fertility. Male frogs, for example, can become female. Not only is it terrible for wildlife, it could end up in our drinking water. For these reasons, it’s banned in the UK and the EU.

Yet atrazine is still widely used in many other countries, including America, India and Australia.

America also allows the use of herbicides such as alachlor and simazine which pollute water supplies, are toxic to wildlife and are classed as ‘ likely’ or ‘ possible’ human carcinogens in high doses.

Is allowing imports of foods that have been treated with these chemicals what the Trump administration means when it asks for ‘fair access’ to British markets as part of any deal? Make no mistake, our wildlife will suffer badly if our farmers are forced to compete by using the same harmful chemicals as our future trading partners.

What’s more, if we go further down the pesticide route, we’ll have even fewer insects, which, in turn, would have a catastrophic effect on animals that feed on them, such as hedgehogs (whose numbers have already been dwindling in recent decades) and farmland birds such as turtle doves.

If Washington gets its way, we will be flooded with ‘cheap’, massproduced food, our farmers will be undercut, and we’ll find ourselves on a downward spiral of ever-lower standards just to compete.

I deliberately use inverted commas around t he word ‘ cheap’ because there’s no such thing as cheap food.

When huge quantities of pesticides, fossil fuels and giant factory farms are used to make food which sells cheaply, it’s because the manufacturing cost comes at a high price to nature, to our NHS from its impact on public health, and to taxpayers if we have to pay to remove toxic chemicals from our drinking water.

So how can we stop such a frightening future?

WE NEED a law that protects this country’s high standards on the environment, animal welfare a nd food t hat would require imported products to be produced to an equally high bar. This would protect us from other countries’ bullying.

It doesn’t matter whether you voted Leave or Remain, none of us voted to lose the common-sense protections that look after our wildlife and improve people’s lives.

We are protecting our wildlife better than some countries, but it is still in fast decline. It is not enough to hope that our politicians can cling on to the protections we still have – we must ban the remaining chemicals that are killing our wildlife and put nature into recovery.

The Conservative Party’s election manifesto promised that ‘ in all of our trade negotiations, we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards’ – and Ministers have repeated this plenty of times since.

On this issue, however, promises are not enough. We need legally binding guarantees.

Farmers and environmental campaigners don’t always see eye to eye. But on this issue, we are united. The British public agree, too. Opinion polls consistently show that the vast majority want to keep these standards. As chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, which looks after 2,300 nature reserves, I’ve regularly heard our members’ concerns and fears over trade deals and compromising standards.

The irony is that by putting the commitment to save our standards into law, it could actually help our trade negotiators. I’ve been involved in difficult negotiations and sometimes it’s simpler if something you don’t want to do is taken out of your control because of a legal requirement.

If you have to tell the other side that something is off the table and can’t be part of the negotiations, you don’t waste time on it. Instead, you negotiate on other matters and reach an agreement.

That’s what the Government needs to do now to protect our wildlife and make sure we can keep our bees buzzing and pollinating – and keep chlorinated chicken off our tables, too.