Other pesticides may indeed be available but, as you may expect, cost more than the ones that have been around for years.
Not surprisingly, farmers and their representatives, as well as the companies producing the older pesticides, have a vested interest in damaging any attempt to get their usage reduced or withdrawn.
I regularly have to review EU documents on pesticides for my job and to claim they're not based in science is fanciful at best. As with any bureaucracy there is a political angle in what gets through but that's no more or less true for the EU than it is for the UK government.
If you want to see what sort of stuff goes into EU decision on chemicals go and have a look at the
ECHA website. For pesticides there is a EU pesticde database (
clickety). Another good one (well, for information) is the
European Food Standards Agency pesticides website.
A fair number of the pesticides that could be banned are known to or can potentially harm things like bees. Now, if the EU is wrong, the cost of food goes up. If the farmers are wrong bee populations collapse and we don't have much left to pollinate the plants we need to grow the food in the first place. Which one do you think would be the bigger problem?
