I was overjoyed to read that the “emergency” use of bee-killing pesticides has finally been banned (Government overturns Tory measure and bans emergency use of bee-killing pesticide, 23 January). This is great news for pollinators; neonicotinoids’ major use is to protect sugar beet crops from aphids. We don’t need sugar beet. East of England farmers have been incentivised for a century to grow a crop that is refined into a white powder with addictive properties, which causes obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Sugar is not nutritious, but is nevertheless the break crop of choice for our nation’s best arable land. While 100,000 hectares of that land continue to be used for sugar, campaigns about a perceived conflict between food security and renewable energy are a red herring. Food security and energy security are complementary benefits for Britain. Sugar only does damage.
Asher Minns
Executive director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia
• I roundly applaud our government for announcing, on the day before the climate and nature bill was being read in parliament, the outright ban on the use of neonicotinoid insecticides in sugar beet production, in line with the EU.
I’m sure it won’t be long before we hear the objections from the sugar beet farmers that this will make the growing of their precious crop uneconomic. I fully acknowledge we need our nation to be as self-sufficient as possible in food production, but ask the question: “Just how important is sugar beet as a food crop?”
At a time when the NHS is being crippled by a national obesity crisis, what logic is there in growing a luxury agricultural crop that is feeding this epidemic and requires the use of one of the most ecologically damaging classes of chemicals known to mankind?
Is it time, perhaps, for sugar beet farmers to turn their skills to growing some genuinely nutritious food, which can be farmed more sustainably?
Prof Richard Evershed
Organic Geochemistry Unit, University of Bristol
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