Italy is the European country that uses the most pesticides, with Lombardia leading the way. A model of agriculture that harms both the environment and human health. A commentary on Ispra data in the editorial by Barbara Meggetto, president of Legambiente Lombardia.
For too long, the agricultural sector has been treated as a kind of free zone, exempt from the application of sufficiently stringent rules for the protection of the environment and water. The evidence lies in the far-from-reassuring data published by Ispra, the national environmental protection agency, on the presence of pesticides in Italian waterways. These are more than a warning signal: Italian agriculture as a whole is seeing its impact on the environment and on health grow in a deeply worrying way, through the indiscriminate use of chemical products.
In 2013, sales had fallen below 120,000 tonnes, but 2014 and 2015 saw a sharp surge, with growth in excess of 10 per cent, which consolidated Italy's position at the top of the ranking of countries that consume the most pesticides in Europe. According to Eurostat data, Italy uses more than 40 per cent more pesticides than France, even though the neighbouring country has twice the agricultural surface area.
This is a trend with serious consequences for both consumer health and the environment — in particular for water and soil pollution — as well as for the reputation enjoyed by Italian agri-food produce: a study by the joint research centre of Ispra reveals that, in the use of insecticides, only 0.1 per cent of the active substances applied in the fields actually reach their intended target; the remainder ends up in surface waters and aquifers. Farmers are paying steep prices simply to pollute the environment in which they work. A paradox.
Lombardia is no exception: of 320 sampling points on Lombard rivers and lakes, as many as 234 (73.1 per cent) are contaminated by pesticides, belonging to 61 substances including active ingredients and still-active molecules derived from their partial degradation. Pesticides are also present in groundwater: specifically, of 474 aquifer monitoring points, no fewer than 125 — more than 26 per cent — were found to be contaminated. And we are not talking about mere traces: in the majority of cases, analytical reports show contamination levels exceeding environmental quality standards. Indeed, Lombardia is the region that surpasses all others in terms of exceedances of levels considered acceptable: pesticide concentrations above threshold values are recorded at no fewer than 158 points in the surface water monitoring network — almost 50 per cent of all sampling points — and at 50 points in the groundwater network. These are situations in which human health and the environment are seriously threatened.
In a region as intensively agricultural and livestock-oriented as Lombardia, the time has come to put a check on the incursions of agro-industry into the fields whose produce is destined to become food. We have reached the paradox that pesticides do more to poison the environment and the farmers who use them than to eradicate the enemies of crops.
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It is fair to say that bringing modernity to Lombard agriculture too can only help the quality of its products to shine through and better protect the health of citizens. We should not forget, after all, that agriculture is one of the sectors that contributes to atmospheric emissions, particularly during the winter months — the most critical period for the formation of fine particulate matter.
It is important that agricultural policies focus attention on rehabilitating over-exploited soils in order to restore their fertility, their organic matter content, their capacity to mitigate the effects of extreme weather events, and their ability to deliver ecosystem services — a capacity that is the hallmark of healthy, properly managed soils.