“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

The sentence in the headline comes from Mark Twain and says that lies are quick, but truth is slow. The fact that 15,000 litres of water are used to produce one kilo of beef is just as wrong as the high iron content of spinach. However, when politics is made with false death figures, it becomes very worrying.

Here is a quote from the author:

“Sometimes what is not reported is more instructive than the news. There are 385 million poisonings with pesticides worldwide every year, 11,000 of them fatal: When employees of the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) published these figures in a study in the journal “BMC Public Health” in December 2020, many media outlets picked them up – especially after they were distributed in the “Pesticide Atlas” of the Green Heinrich Böll Foundation. The figures could be heard on Deutschlandfunk , seen in the TV magazine “Monitor” and read in the “World Agriculture Report” , among others . The study was also cited around 300 times in scientific publications.

Before this study, the non-governmental organization Foodwatch, among others, had even spoken of 200,000 deaths annually from pesticide poisoning – supposedly a “United Nations estimate” from 2017. In fact, however, the number came from a thought experiment published in Sri Lanka in 1985 based on even older figures, which were then extrapolated globally. Above all, almost three quarters of the cases in Sri Lanka were not accidental poisonings, but suicides . After critical research, Foodwatch finally had to backtrack.”

https://www.braunschweiger-zeitung.de/niedersachsen/article407688247/pestizid-vergiftungen-politik-mit-falschen-zahlen-von-der-ngo.html

It is also critical that, according to the author, “these false figures were also used at a hearing in the Bundestag.”

I would like to cite the following questions in this paper:

4. What sustainable farming methods can reduce the use of chemical-synthetic pesticides while ensuring agricultural productivity and yields to ensure diversified production for food security? What impact does this have on land and water use in agriculture?

12. How can a sustainable and environmentally friendly agricultural policy be designed and what is the tension between environmental/biodiversity protection and yield?

The answers are simple:

Regarding question 1: if food security is a global priority, there is not much room for maneuver.

Regarding question 2: Any form of food procurement is an intervention in nature.

[Editor’s Note: This article has been translated from German.]

Read the original post here