Stop using pesticides will make the world starves

You might be surprised, upset or angry at me, but that is the true about pesticides, if we just decide or we just change regulations tomorrow and avoid farmers to use pesticides the world is going to starve, we will create the third world war because we won’t be able anymore to feed people.

 I tell you why:

(i)            Today farmers are hostages of a chemical crop control system, where the more they use chemicals, the less it works because of what we call resistance in agriculture.

(ii)           Production costs are insane, as the billionaire multinational companies as Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, FMC, Corteva and so on set the price not based on a markup the understand it is needed to sustain their business but based on how much can farmers pay! In the end of the day they control farmers profit.

(iii)         There are few biological/organically solutions that are financially affordable, as the majority of the multinational biotechs decided to use the same pricing system as the pesticides ones, and if the farmer has to choose between paying the same price for a bio solution as they are paying for pesticides, they will choose pesticides because they know it works in a short term, and they are not so sure bio solutions work.

(iv)          Without a bio solution and not being able to use pesticides, farmers will go bankrupt, as being a farmer will not be sufficient to make a living (and actually it is almost impossible to make a living even today).

(v)           We need to produce 70% more food in the next 10 years, and there is no land available to sustain this growth, we need to produce more in the same land, so we need more technology applied supporting yield increase;

Then what do we do?

There are a lot of startups and solutions being developed and a lot of them already ready to help farmers to be sustainable, profitable and productive, but the current regulation in EU, USA, LATAM was made for pesticides and not for biological solutions, and there are many regulatory barriers that need to be removed. 

We know that’s not an easy journey, as there is a lot of lobby coming from the billionaire industry of pesticides, but we need to try, to be focused and to be ready to act when the opportunities come up.

Politicians and policy makers, and environmental activists must speak and speech less, and act more. They need to understand that nobody wins unless everybody wins! Solutions need to be built in a collaborative way, placing all stakeholders together in a table, exploring a transition plan.

So, it’s up to you to decide if we are going to create the third world war or not. What do you choose?