Stinging rebuke

YOUR leader (10 May) highlighted the role of bees in food production, emphasising the serious implications should we no longer benefit from their presence.

Unfortunately, your proposed solution – a clampdown on pesticides – would have similarly severe consequences. About 40 per cent of the world’s food production would be lost to pests and diseases without them.

Both bees and pesticides are crucial to modern farming, and key to feeding two billion more people by 2050.

Nick von Westenholz

Crop Protection Assoc

Peterborough