The hidden rise of UK pesticide use

The pro-pesticide lobby regularly claim that “the amount of pesticides used in the UK has halved since 1990”. This statistic is used to bat away growing public concerns over the negative impacts caused by pesticides and to resist calls for stricter regulations.

But this claim is highly misleading. It is based solely on weight when, in reality, modern pesticides are so much more toxic than they used to be that we now need much less of a chemical to do the same job. That’s why using weight to compare pesticide use over time is meaningless.

In contrast to industry claims, by most internationally accepted measures, UK pesticide use is in fact rising, and consequently so is the exposure of citizens and the natural environment to their harmful impacts. The number of times crops are sprayed with pesticides has risen, as has the area of land treated. For example, between 1990 and 2016, the total area of UK land sprayed with pesticides increased by 63%.