How pesticides harm our health and wildlife

Despite industry claims to the contrary, pesticide use is going up. Highly toxic pesticides remain in use. And crops are being treated more frequently with a greater variety of pesticides than ever before.

Pesticides:

• seriously harm nature and wildlife

• trap farmers in a system that only helps a handful of corporations

• can affect our endocrine system and be linked with certain cancers

Intensive pesticide use is also a crutch, holding up an already damaging industrial farming sector.

Pesticides and our health

We are all exposed to pesticides.

Farm workers can be exposed through their day to day jobs. Those of us who live in rural areas can be exposed to drifting pesticides sprayed near our homes and schools. In urban areas, we can be exposed through their use on weeds, lawns, parks and playgrounds. Many people use pesticides in their own gardens. Too often, pesticides end up in our food.

Scientists increasingly believe there is no safe lower dose for human exposure.

Many pesticides are endocrine disruptors, meaning they can interfere with hormone systems, affecting everything from thyroid function to fertility - even at very low doses.

Because exposure is so widespread, it is difficult to prove simple cause-and-effect relationships, such as exposure to a specific amount of a pesticide causing a specific cancer.

However, long-term exposure to pesticide traces has been linked to cancers, such as leukaemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, as well as asthma, depression and anxiety, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the development of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease.

Pesticides and the farmland wildlife crash

Research indicates pesticides are playing a significant part in the catastrophic farmland wildlife crash. Despite recent success with the banning of neonicotinoids, removing single pesticides in isolation is not the answer. They will simply be replaced. 

What is needed now is a farming system that moves away from this reliance on pesticides, like organic farming.

We want the next generation of farmers to grow up without the pressure to put toxic chemicals on their fields, and the next generation of children never to eat them. It isn't enough to fight for a ban after ban. We need to break the cycle.

The combined effects of multiple pesticides

Pesticide approvals are largely based on safety tests of individual chemicals. But on real farms, pesticides are not used in isolation.

Farmers often apply multiple products over a growing season, including insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. This combined exposure is rarely tested, despite growing evidence that mixtures of pesticides can have additive or even synergistic effects.

As a result, current approvals may significantly underestimate the real-world risks that pesticides pose to nature and human health.

What are neonicotinoids?

Neonicotinoids are a group of insecticides that act on insects’ central nervous systems. They work by blocking specific neural pathways, causing disorientation, an inability to feed, and ultimately death.

How do neonicotinoids affect bees and other wildlife?

These insecticides are supposed to be more targeted than non-systemic pesticides. However, in practice, they still cause widespread environmental harm.

Because they are systemic, these insecticides are taken up into every part of a growing crop. This includes small amounts in the pollen and nectar of flowers, where bees and other pollinators can become exposed to small doses. Whilst these aren’t usually enough to kill outright, they are enough to affect the ability of these insects to survive.

Most of these chemicals leach out of plants and seeds into soil and water. Nearby wild plants absorb them and become toxic. Despite the partial ban, this is still happening on thousands of hectares of our countryside, on cereal crops, like wheat, that are still being treated.

Even when an animal isn’t exposed directly to a neonicotinoid, they can be affected. There is evidence that many bird populations may be crashing as a result of a lack of food, due to the loss of insects harmed by neonicotinoid contamination in water courses.

What’s the latest on neonicotinoids?

On 27 April 2018, neonicotinoids were banned on all outdoor crops in the EU. However, in early January 2021, the UK government approved the emergency use of one type of neonicotinoid called thiamethoxam. The government continued to uphold this decision every year since - in 2022, 2023 and 2024.

What is glyphosate?

Glyphosate is a widely used weed killer found in products, such as Roundup. While people commonly use it in their gardens, it is applied at a far larger scale in agriculture and by public bodies.

Glyphosate in farming 

Many farmers use glyphosate to help kill weeds right before crops start to grow in the spring.

Alarmingly, they are also used right before harvesting. The aim is to dry out the crop to make them easier to harvest. This happens despite the fact that there is little evidence to show any benefits. This has resulted in glyphosate residue appearing in many day-to-day food items, including bread.

Glyphosate and human health

Concerns about the dangers of glyphosate to human health have been around for years. And in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a branch of the World Health Organisation, concluded that glyphosate products have the potential to cause cancer. Since then, concern has mounted that glyphosate-based weedkillers may not be safe for the workers who use them, or even at the levels found in our food.

Chemical companies, the food industry and safety regulators claim glyphosate poses no danger to the British public. However, safety regulators often refer to unpublished industry studies that aren't publicly available and have never passed peer review or received expert critique. They also mainly look at glyphosate on its own.

In the real world, glyphosate is always mixed with other chemicals to make sure the glyphosate sticks to and penetrates the plants it’s sprayed on. Studies, like those examined by the IARC, looked at what farmers are using and how these have the potential to harm our health even at the low doses found in our food.

In recent years, these studies, along with those which have linked glyphosate with certain forms of cancer in workers, have raised concerns that glyphosate-based weed killers may not be safe after all.