Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2016-04-12-Speech-2-117-000"
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"en.20160412.4.2-117-000"2
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"Mr President, the Commissioner will be relieved to hear that most of my remarks are not going to be addressed to him directly because he is the wrong Commissioner, unfortunately, for this particular crisis in agriculture that is about to be visited on my industry by the European Parliament. I refer to the quite possible ban on the use of glyphosate on farms. We are voting on this tomorrow and it would be disastrous. This is a really big crisis. What has brought this about? Why are we even considering banning this very useful material?
The reason is that the World Health Organisation has said that it is probably carcinogenic. On the face of it, we might all be very concerned about this, as it is serious and we should therefore not be using this material – until you look at what else the World Health Organisation also classes as probably carcinogenic. They say that sitting in front of a log fire in your home during the winter is probably a carcinogenic activity; they say that working night shifts is probably a carcinogenic activity; they say that cutting human hair (which will not worry the Commissioner or me) is probably a carcinogenic activity; exposure to dry cleaning fluid is probably a carcinogenic activity, and drinking the national drink of Argentina (which is called mate) is also probably a carcinogenic activity.
When you look at these things, a ban on glyphosate is absolutely ludicrous – but it gets worse than that. What do they call definitely carcinogenic? Well, that includes the consumption of alcohol, the ingestion of the female contraceptive pill, and the consumption of processed meats. These are deliberately ingested, whereas glyphosate is just something that you may happen to be exposed to. If we do go ahead with this ban, what are the alternatives?
The alternatives are for farmers to have to cultivate the soil far more than they ever used to. If you believe that farmers can improve the world’s weather by reducing CO2 emissions from their farms, you will have scored a massive own-goal here if you vote for this tomorrow, because you will pump out CO2 from all these tractor operations to try and control perennial weeds of twitch and thistles and the new weed we are all getting now called black grass. That is all going to become much more difficult.
Now, what is all this really about? It is about not allowing farmers to grow GM crops, because if you ban glyphosate there will be no incentive to grow the GM crop. Let us face it: that what the ban is in aid of. I am not sure whether the Council are going to have a vote on this. I have been told that they may not, which means that our Secretary of State for Agriculture, Elizabeth Truss, will be told tomorrow that farmers in Britain cannot use glyphosate. What an extraordinary state of affairs."@en1
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