Minister Says UK Needs to Balance Food Security With Combating Insect Decline

A bee collects pollen in the early morning sun and rests on the petal of a courgette plant flower in Bristol, England, in an undated file photo. Ben Birchall/PA Wire

A government minister has told MPs there is a balance to be found between reversing the decline in Britain’s insect population and helping farmers to boost production and enable the country to have “food security.”

Environment minister Rebecca Pow was addressing the House of Commons Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee, which is examining research that suggests “the flying insects that are central to UK food security have declined significantly, with potentially catastrophic effects.”

Insects like bees and butterflies play an important role in pollinating food crops.

Ms. Pow said, “Quite clearly, producing our own food is really important, having a sustainable supply, increasingly so with the global pressures that we face, that’s really brought that into stark focus.”

She said Britain currently produces 60 percent of its own food, or up to 73 percent with some crops.

Ms. Pow said: “So it’s obviously really important to get this balance right. But insects quite clearly are hugely important to the production of our food, the value pollinators give to us per hectare, which is why we do need to encourage them.”

She said there remain considerable “knowledge gaps” about why Britain’s insect population is in decline, but she said it was no doubt partly linked to the use of pesticides in farming.

National Action Plan on Pesticides

Ms. Pow said the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) would be publishing a national action plan on pesticides shortly.

Rachel Irving, Defra’s deputy director for pesticides, chemicals, and hazardous waste, accompanied Ms. Pow to the meeting and said: “You can talk about pesticides by load per tonne but that doesn’t really tell you what you need. What you really need to look at is how that is impacting on different species, whether that’s insects or mammals or birds.”

She said Defra had recently funded research into a pesticide loading indicator, which could analyse data to work out the propensity of different pesticides to bioaccumulate, as well as their relative toxicity to wildlife.

Ms. Pow said Brexit had given the UK more flexibility when it came to handing out subsidies to farmers which might benefit wildlife.

She said under the European Union’s common agricultural policy, “we used to just pay farmers for owning land,” whereas now, “they have to do something, some environmental good for the money.”

Ms. Pow said the benefits from the Sustainable Farming Initiative had come about because the UK government had been able to tailor its own system rather than going along with the EU’s one-size-fits-all policy.

Downside of Urban Beekeeping

Labour MP Dawn Butler, who sits on the committee, said firefighters in her constituency had looked into starting an urban beekeeping project as part of community outreach, but discovered it was actually discouraged.

Research published in the last few years has suggested there is insufficient pollen in cities and domesticated honeybees end up depriving wild bees.

In September, researchers published a study in the journal Nature that suggested up to 75 percent of bumblebee species across Europe may be threatened in the next few decades.

The scientists, from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said it was estimated that under the worst-case scenarios European bumblebees would lose up to 30 percent of their current habitat in the next 50 years, putting 75 percent of bumblebee species at risk.

A report in 2020, published by The Wildlife Trusts, claimed 16,900 tonnes of pesticides were applied to the countryside every year and insects had also been hit by a loss of habitats, with 97 percent of the UK’s wildflower meadows vanishing since the 1930s.

The report called for the UK to match or better the EU’s target of halving the overall use of pesticides by 2030.

The report’s lead author, Dave Goulson, a professor from the University of Sussex, said: “Insects are the canaries in the coal mine – their collapse is an alarm bell that we must not ignore. Action is needed from every section of society, we all need to change this together.”