A dawn roadblock, fifteen pesticide drums used as barricades, and over forty arrests, including that of Greenpeace UK‘s programs director, Amy Cameron. On May 20, World Bee Day turned into a logistical and communication tug-of-war in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, where protesters from the environmental NGO sealed off access to the headquarters of Syngenta, a Chinese-owned multinational agricultural chemical company.
Local police intervened to monitor a situation that forced the temporary closure of the nearby A62 roadway. In front of the gates, the access traffic circle was repainted with an arrow addressed to the group’s offices, accompanied by the message,“Syngenta poisons nature.”
A teaspoonful of thirteen million bees
The initiative turns the spotlight on data from the NGO’s latest report, which found that a tiny amount, the equivalent of a teaspoon, of the pesticide Hallmark contains enough active ingredient to kill thirteen million bees. A figure that environmentalists see as a direct threat to food security, given that 75 percent of the world’s crops are tied to the activity of pollinators.
“Today’s arrests represent a police overreaction,” Will McCallum, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, told the Guardian, questioning the management of the square. “We need to dramatically reduce the use of chemicals on our land and in our waterways, and farmers need funding to be able to do that.” According to the organization’s argument, the ecological transition of the countryside cannot happen without public economic cover that protects those who work the land.
The market factor
For its part, Syngenta spoke out without contesting the right to protest but defending the usefulness of its formulations. In an official note, the group’s spokesmen reiterated that “plant protection products play a key role in global food security,” the British newspaper reports.
The company’s position is based on agricultural risk management: without large-scale protection systems, pests, weeds, and plant diseases would threaten to decimate crops, leading to dwindling supplies and a consequent increase in consumer prices. The clash in Yorkshire thus highlights the complexity of the contemporary debate: the need to safeguard the biological balance of the land on the one hand, the need to ensure quantitative stability of food chains on the other.
The petition
Reinforcing the mobilization, Greenpeace has also launched a public petition against what it calls the European “deregulation” of pesticides. In the campaign text, the organization accuses European governments of seeking to favor large agrochemical groups such as Bayer and Syngenta through the new “Omnibus Package,” a regulatory proposal that environmentalists say risks reducing periodic checks on pesticides and prolonging their market approvals.
The petition especially stresses the issue of chronic exposure to chemical residues in food. Greenpeace argues that the problem involves not only the toxicity of individual substances, but the combined effect of multiple pesticides simultaneously in food, so-called “multi-residue.” In the association’s crosshairs end up products such as glyphosate, neonicotinoids, fungicides and insecticides, which are accused of having harmful effects on both pollinators and, potentially, human health in the long run.
