What pesticides do organic farmers use and are they any better or worse than conventional ones?
Sandra Bell: Generally the principle of organic farming is to try to avoid the use of any pesticides at all and so, for example, farmers use more crop rotation to avoid the kind of build up of any disease in any particular field. They also try to do more diverse cropping so that they’re not leaving the crop so susceptible to attack by pests and diseases. Having said that, there are some crops which are hard to grow without any kind of pesticide – for example, organic potato farmers do tend to use pesticides, organic apple growers too. But there are only a very limited number of pesticides approved – I think there’s about six that are allowed in organic farming whereas for non-organic farming there’s about 400 different pesticides approved. Our view is that organic farming needs to improve alongside non-organic farming. We’d like to see the pesticides that organic farmers use replaced as well but that’s going to require research and development into finding alternatives to them. Manisha
