The organic lobby is skating on thinner ice every year with its arguments against crop protection products.

Continuing to claim that chemicals are damaging human health without any scientific backing is at best fanciful and at worst scurrilous.

If the conventional growers of the world were to unite against their organic counterparts and put the facts on the table, this whole debate would be scuppered in a very short space of time. When the organic lobby started its stampede, it may have had half a point about pesticide usage. In 2007, the organic and conventional worlds - certainly as we see them in the UK produce industry - are in danger of colliding, so significant has the convergence of the two sets of farming “methods” been.

If the organic lobbyists have their way, and only politicians have the power to allow that, what happens to the supposed fight against world poverty? Banning crop protection chemicals on products grown in the EU will have an enormous effect on the economic future of the poorer producing nations in the Union and severely impair their ability to produce food for their own people, let alone the more affluent European consumers, who directives such as this largely profess to protect.

Isn’t it time for peace in this ridiculous stand-off. Organics is a marketing tool, it is not there to save the world. Face the facts and tell the truth.