The report itself[†] blames the pesticide residue on a "boomerang effect" from EU countries: EU countries export these banned pesticides to third countries, those countries use the banned pesticides on the food they grow, and then the EU countries import that food. In effect, EU companies are still profiting off of the sale and use of banned pesticides on food that Europeans will eat.
I know someone close who grows oranges in Spain. He has to go through hell, had to rework multiple times the fields so that they pass the strict Spanish regulation for organic produce. They get evaluated not only on the final product being pesticide free, but also on the full process being compliant, with heavy fines for non compliance.
This is fine-ish, except that the imported oranges get checked only seldomly (if that) and are given a lot of leeway, making it very hard to compete if you grow them locally. Last couple of years saw some profit for growing them locally, but it's been times where there was literally no profit at all for 5+ years.
Funny story: he requested a permit to build a well, and ofc it takes forever so he just waited. After 4-5 years waiting, having even forgotten about it, someone called him: "we're here to inspect the well". What well? You haven't given me permission yet. "yes, we know, but people build them anyway before getting permission so we thought you'd do the same".
I was surprised after moving to Ireland to discover that you can break the law and nothing will happen. I went through hell with planners (idiots who don’t believe in climate change and hate eaves) while people around me put three mobile homes on their land as well as building two permanent homes with no permission (and ripping out ancient hedgerows) and successfully got retention. Why even bother?
2 months ago there was a story about a huge family mansion in Meath being demolished after a court found they did not have the proper planning permissions, and the council was unwilling to grant the permissions after the fact. Also just last week a judge ordered the demolition/removal of 26 mobile homes from a site in Dublin set up without permissions.
Friends of mine recently got planning permission for a house they've been living in for about 3 years already.
So you can def roll the dice on such things, maybe you get away with it for decades, maybe your house gets flattened.
My (also an immigrant like you) take on Ireland is that many of these systems are run and controlled by humans, and you can get pretty far by trying to make that human connection with the people controlling your fate. My wife was initially refused maternity benefit, because she did not have enough social security contributions. She works part-time, and she was missing 1 contribution (about €120) out of something like 38 for the year. After friends (the same from above) suggested we phone them and talk to the people, the maternity benefit application was approved. I find that there is a lot less "sorry can't help you, computer says no" here.
> I find that there is a lot less "sorry can't help you, computer says no" here.
Unless of course you need assistance with a privacy issue concerning US big tech. Then suddenly you'll be met with nothing but silence in Ireland, as the stream of incoming billions from being a compliance haven for criminal US companies must continue flowing.
Corruption like Orbán stealing my taxes to fund a palace for himself? This is the most smug, privileged thing I've read in a while. If you're fine with corruption, say it loud and proud.
It's funny you say this because, at least from what I've seen, groups that are historically discriminated against seem to be receiving more latitude in skirting the law.
My suspicion is that leaving things like e.g. qualification for social benefits to the judgment of whoever happens to be talking to the claimant introduces the possibility of bias entering the decision.
It can, but I don't think we should assume it did. Innocent until proven guilty and all, and unfortunately most if not all laws come down to judgement calls by those in charge.
Eh, algorithmic / procedural bias is also a thing, and it can line up with the kinds of protected characteristics the rules are ostensibly there to prevent discrimination on the basis of. See, for example, redlining in the USA. I suspect the benefits of allowing discretion generally outweigh the risks it creates, provided that the aggregate feedback of that discretion is taken into account when redesigning the procedures, so that discretion doesn't become load-bearing as the real world moves on and the procedures stay in the same place.
I jokingly refer to this as the Catholic principle: "sin first - confess and repent later" as it's a common theme in countries that are/were traditionally Catholic, including my own.
It's really just places culturally untouched by Calvinism, Puritanism and the like, all of which put emphasis on order.
The last thing to attempt bringing order to them were various forms of authoritarianism and they didn't last. I think we can agree this is not the right approach.
It's not just a Catholic thing, in Book II of Plato's Republic (written ~2,400 years ago) Adeimantus mentions that some people say there's no point in acting justly because you can just act unjustly and sacrifice to the gods later to make it up.
You joke, but it's not remotely Catholic in principle. A confession is by definition invalid if premeditated.
A presupposition of confession is that you have contrition and the resolve not to sin and wish to receive absolution (which doesn't remove the need for temporal justice btw). Premeditation and without remorse turns that confession into an empty act, and indeed, another sin.
Calvinists also believe in confession. Indeed, it doesn't even require the uncomfortable encounter with a priest. You can just do it privately in their view.
This touches on the purpose of sacraments in the Catholic Church. They are meant to be visible signs that give assurance and certainty that something has taken place. If a human being were to show perfect contrition (very rare), then there is no need for the confessional (and ultimately, God is not bound by the sacraments). But for the penitent, the confessional gives assurance of absolution, provided there is some measure of requisite contrition. You don't have to wonder about your eternal fate after leaving the confessional.
The idea that Catholic societies are corrupt or and Calvinist societies are tidy and ordered is a stereotype, and it is silly and ahistorical to claim that you need authoritarianism to bring order to Catholic countries. Catholic societies have a greater tolerance for the messiness of human life. It views itself like a field hospital ready to provide people with means to get back up and to heal. Calvinists, on the other hand, are strangled by their constant anxiety about whether they are part of the elect or not. That can translate into rigidity, rigorism, scrupulosity, and OCD. These, in turn, can resort in a backlash of moral laxity.
(Another stereotype is the Protestant work ethic. Apparently, no one ever heard of the Benedictines and their influence on Europe. There is also a healthy attitude toward work and an unhealthy one.)
Maybe I'm a Calvinist. I'm definitely happier in the Netherlands. My general experience was that Irish laws existed mostly for show and if you followed them you were a chump. Unless you wanted to smoke a joint now and then, of course.
Ireland supposedly cares about nature too, but you can still buy truckloads of turf off the side of the road in Offaly. Good luck getting those rules enforced.
When we still lived in Dublin I got pretty tired of having to push my baby in her pram in the street because the pavements (sidewalks) were completely covered in cars, even in the city centre trying to get to the YMCA creche.
Our experience wasn't limited to "victimless" crimes though. I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land where there's kids or sheep then authoritarianism is called for.
You may have a point but you're discrediting yourself by using extreme hyperbole.
Authoritarianism would be you and your family getting picked up and interrogated sometime at night for this critical comment you just made.
And saying "crime is legal" when referring to cars parked on the sidewalk or you having had a bad experience with a neighbours dog? I think if you reflect a little you'd realise that these are the kind of "crimes" you probably have committed yourself countless times.
Thats some mighty hyperbole, not everybody is breaking some minor (or not so minor) laws 50x a day. Or a year.
Societies where there is high amount of respect towards each other and rules tend to perform much better over long time, ie Switzerland. Its a pleasure to live in such society especially when coming from more messy ones, triple that with small kids.
> Thats some mighty hyperbole, not everybody is breaking some minor (or not so minor) laws 50x a day. Or a year.
How do you know? Do you know of all of the protected species of bug in your country for instance?
In my town there are laws about using profanity in public. I'm sure they would be deemed illegal if charges were brought but the law is still on the books.
I don't want to discount your experience or judge that particular event. I just disagree with calling for authoritarianism in response to that.
Happy that you are happier :) I'm German, so in general I find it refreshing when people manage to live peacefully with each other without having a rule for every single thing. Obviously a dog endangering children is not such a case.
Last year I was in a Samsung shop when one couple remarked to me that it was the second time they came to buy the same phone for the wife in a month. Then naturally I asked for the reason why, I thought they like it so much to buy a second one.
Apparently the couple just recently come back from a trip in Ireland and lost the new Samsung phone there. Someone has stolen the wife's baggage from the bus when it's doing the routine transit stop by the bus stop while opening the bus baggage conpartment. By the time they realised the thief already going away from the bus with the baggage with the new Samsung phone inside it. They reported to the police but nothing happened. In UAE, Singapore or Japan this type of crime is just not worth it since the petty thief will be punished severely. A lady can incidently left her Louis Vuitton bag inside a restaurant in Dubai, left it at her seat, then after a few hours come back to fetch the bag without losing anything inside.
there was a recent case of a kid who was literally stabbed by a sihk guy and got arrested because the sihk guy said the guy said something racist.
Now before you say that I need to check my white privilege, I am brown. everytime one of these people commit these crimes and the police look the other way in the name of political correctness, it gives legitimacy to the racists who want to cast all of us in a bad light. Law and order needs to be a applied equally and its very strange to me how people are getting arrested for speech when they are a direct consequence of government policies. don't make teh speech illegal, correct the issues the=is speech is surfacing.
> As of March 2023, Emirati authorities continued to incarcerate with no legal basis at least 51 Emirati prisoners who completed their sentences between 1 month and nearly 4 years ago. The prisoners are all part of the grossly unfair “UAE94” mass trial of 69 government critics, whose convictions violated their rights to free expression, assembly, and association. UAE authorities used baseless counterterrorism justifications to continue holding them past their completed sentences. Some prisoners completed their sentences as early as July 2019.
> I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land where there's kids or sheep then authoritarianism is called for.
It doesn't have to require authoritarianism to keep the peace. It also doesn't seem like it could only be solved by an authority. If there's a dangerous dog on your property, shoot it if you can't get it to leave and fear for the safety of your kids or sheep.
Sure, every action has reactions. I'm not saying the first response should be to shoot the dog in such a scenario, it should be the last resort least of all because it wasn't the dog creating the situation.
It and to be handled though. Yes, there may be retaliation for shooting the dog but there may be retaliation for calling the cops as well. All you can do is deal with the situation at hand, there is no magic bullet authority or otherwise.
> I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land
I know too little about this specific situation, but did the neighbour not stop despite being asked to?
I haven't been to Ireland or the Netherlands (aside from driving through of course), but from what I've heard I would not like it in the latter. Nature appears to be scarce there, as for some reason the Dutch insist on being an agricultural superpower despite the population density.
The reason is roughly that there were devastating food shortages in the world wars, and avoiding that happening again has been an important force in Dutch politics since.
> I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land where there's kids or sheep then authoritarianism is called for.
You jumped straight to authoritarianism? How about trying self-defense?
The guy who carries a pistol and shoots the neighbor's dogs in self defense, I would expect that guy to face some social consequences and he'd be lucky if it was just the police.
Hobbes. we create the Leviathan so we don't have to constantly act in self defense. The alternative was cold, brutish, and short.
OMG the planning system is definitely an issue in this country. I did try to wing it but had to demolish a small structure, retention was not approved. Their letters are insanely threatening, like you can go to jail or pay a fine in millions. But then another time I just did the planning permission in my own name, drawings and all and it was approved fairly quickly despite me not being an eng or arch. It depends on the town/city you are in and the planning department. I used to deal with planning in other European countries and Ireland just lacks technical supervision step, hence the dependence on neighbours notifying the council and on the front loading of the initial application process.
There also are a lot of things that could help a lot with reducing heat gain in the summer that planners are strongly opposed to, like eaves (which let in the sun in winter but not in the midday in summer), and I can't fathom why.
We’ve had a warmer than average year worldwide every year since 1976. I suppose it’s just coincidence that exactly what climate scientists said would happen keeps happening and keeps getting worse.
There is a lot of truth to this but things are changing e.g. those houses without planning permission getting torn down. That simply would not have happened two decades ago.
Family next door had 17 kids (yes, from one mother), 5 dangerous dogs, and absolutely despised us (somehow we thought having a few acres of land would make worrying about neighbours less necessary). There was an ongoing decades-old land feud with the farmer behind both of our homes. The aforementioned dangerous dogs killed several of the farmer's sheep, so the farmer finally shot and killed one of the dogs during an attack on said sheep, which escalated tensions. We had 2 and 4 year old kids who, it's worth noting, were roughly the size of sheep and about as tempting for the dogs to kill, so we were basically terrified to let our kids outside. Neighbours routinely insulted us, yelled at us, and threw
garbage (including old chemical containers, sharp metal, etc.) on to our land.
They also routinely trespassed and shot fireworks over our thatch roof (the roof was part thatch, part modern) - very concerning when your roof is more flammable than kindling. Finally they left a dead crow in a bag by our door which felt like a threat, so we sold the place at a €100k loss and moved to the Netherlands.
Gardai were absolutely lazy, uncaring, and useless, and did absolutely nothing.
Now I encourage everyone I can to stay as far away from rural Ireland as possible.
Mostly to be careful. The house was an absolute dream on paper. It was even something you could commute to Dublin from on the train in a pinch.
I eventually gained some biases that the former-me who lived in the lefty "Dublin 2 and https://irishtechcommunity.com/" bubble wouldn't have been particularly quick to espouse. Now that it's been a few years I think I'm a little better at seeing different sides of things politically, at least.
No, we moved to Houten (about 5km from central Utrecht). It's been great! Friendly neighbours, good school that my kids walk to (they can walk and bike all over the place actually), pretty efficient bureaucracy, great public transit.. Though you know, even some places in the Netherlands (Hilversum comes to mind) won't stop people parking on pavements for some reason, which is annoying. Overall I really like it though.
There is an official eu organic label. It’s not compulsory of course, but it’s the baseline for organic food production in and for Europe. Other (private) labels have stricter rules and are usually certified in addition to the EU label.
No, this is definitely an official gvmt body that can fine you if you try to sell fruit as organic that doesn't follow the regulations. It IS definitely compulsory if you mark your produce as organic.
"IMHO organic labels optimize for the wrong things."
What do you mean?
I only know of "Demeter", that also has some very esoteric requirements (homeopathy, cosmic energy flow rituals) - but otherwise organic label optimize for:
- no or little pesticides and herbicides
- more space and better condition for the animals
My only other grievance is that they also all ban GMO
They optimise for natural. So you can still have pesticides and herbicides. If you find your poison in some plant, it is fine. If you synthetize the same molecule in a factory, then it's not allowed.
As for the animal welfare, true, but there are also labels specifically for that that.
Biodynamic at least requires farms to produce their own fertilizers. For that reason alone I try to buy it. Fertilizer dependency will be the end of us
I ignore all the magic stuff (in fact, if you have some spiritual devotion to the food you're growing I think that's just fine)
Am aware of that, bug glyphosat is definitely not allowed and likely a result of neighbors spraying plentiful in bad wind conditions (there are strict regulations in theory, that are usually ignored in reality)
This is a common complaint in the EU, since enforcement is by ones own government, everyone believes that they are the only ones being held to account. It may or may not be true in general, but it sure gives that impression
The way I understand it, at least here in France, the complaint isn't exactly that some other random EU country has lax enforcement of the EU laws. Rather, it's about the various trade agreements with non-EU countries not known for their strict rules. The latest one being with Mercosur, and the main gripe being with Brazil (presumably because of their huge output, not sure if they're considered worse than the others by whatever metric). Another usual suspect is "ukrainian chicken".
Sure, the agreements say that whatever is imported needs to comply with this or that standard, but customs rarely inspect these. So you end up importing produce which is much cheaper than the local-grown one and which also doesn't comply with the strict local laws. That's where the "unfair competition" happens.
Sure, I bet French farmers aren't too happy to see tomatoes or whatever grown in other EU countries with cheaper labor flood the local market. However, anecdotally, I never see produce from eastern Europe here in Paris. Non-French usually means Spanish or Netherlands if it's EU, or northern Africa if not. You can mayyybe find son specialty cheese or meat from abroad, but outside the very common Italian varieties and Gouda, it's really not easy to find in regular supermarkets.
However, for some reason, apples from freaking Chile and South Africa seem very common, even in season, although apples grow fine here, including that specific variety (pink lady). And when I do find locally-grown ones, they're usually at the same price.
It's likely that centralized logistics makes even price-competetive local produce unattractive for large retailers. Much easier to deal with one large supplier halfway around the world than hundreds or thousands.
Sorry if it was not clear, this is about Spain/EU enforcement in Spain vs EU enforcement in Morocco, where we import tons of fruits from. I think it's plenty obvious that the enforcement level will be different at the source.
Edit: I've asked that myself multiple times. There's also some stubbornness there as well TBF.
>Funny story: he requested a permit to build a well, and ofc it takes forever so he just waited. After 4-5 years waiting, having even forgotten about it, someone called him: "we're here to inspect the well". What well? You haven't given me permission yet. "yes, we know, but people build them anyway before getting permission so we thought you'd do the same".
Meanwhile nobody bats an eye in Spain if you hire illegal African immigrants, pay them far below minimum wage and house them in shacks without electricity and running water. Places like Almería look like slave towns.
Because it's fields+trees that have been there for decades, and even if there's no profit few years, it still pays for the salaries of the workers and expenses of maintaining the fields. If you stop it, things die and then it's more expensive to restart.
Which might or might not be safer than synthetic ones. Fundamental job of pesticides and herbicides is to kill stuff. Just because it appears in nature does not mean it is safe.
But "organic" also targets soil health, biodiversity, animal well-being, and the environment in general.
Some synthetic pesticides / herbicides / fungicides hardly break down in the environment. Which leads to accumulation of a cocktail of such chemicals in soil & ground/surface waters. Ultimately appearing everywhere in air, drinking water & food. Not unlike microplastics, PFAS etc. How this affects humans' health is largely unknown.
Generally, chemicals produced by plants also break down naturally. So they don't accumulate in soils over time.
So it's kind of "exclude nature as much as possible, cleanroom style" versus "work with nature to keep things in a healthy balance".
Unfortunately this is an all too common pattern in the history of pesticides. In 1979 DBCP was banned in the US after factory workers became sterile. Dow Chemical happily shipped tons of it to be sprayed directly on banana workers in banana republics[0] by Dole/Chiquita/Del Monte. To this day Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, and Nicaragua have some of the highest rates of infertility, birth defects, and chronic illnesses in the world
This was just after the Gros Michel had gone basically extinct because of monocropping. The banana companies hired scientists to figure out what to do that almost universally recommended diversifying the crop. But they calculated that it'd actually be cheaper to just double down on pesticide application and start again with another monocrop.
There's an incredible documentary about the banana industry history (and practices that continue to this day like banana companies paying gangs to assassinate local labor leaders) called Bananaland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoRmtQht8-E
All but 2 countries in South America have had the experience of democratically electing a leader only to have them overthrown in a US-backed coup. The US/CIA started with this obsession with the 1954 Guatemalan Coup specifically to maintain Guatemala as a banana republic. Chiquita owned most land in Guatemala and left is uncultivated to stifle competition. Jacobo Árbenz wanted to (slightly) tax this land to reduce poverty. Chiquita hired Edward Bernays (yes, that guy. The father of modern public relations, nephew of Freud, etc) for an influence campaign and eventually got CIA to launch Operation PBSuccess in 1953. The CIA/Chiquita gave very extensive lists of political opponents to murder during the coup.
One way to view current US politics is that the broader banana republic tendency ran out of South American governments to overthrow and moved back to the domestic government, which has now taken on all the corruption and extractive politics of South American CIA-backed dictatorships. The violence levels are not comparable .. yet. But having an explicitly political paramilitary force that's shot a few citizens in the street is not a good sign.
There's a well-known sociological concept called "imperial boomerang" that describes this. It's also seen in surveillance technologies used against oppressed people. As far back as the surveillance apparatus Britain built in Ireland which eventually came to roost on the British people themselves
I’ll never miss an opportunity to plug a very relevant Behind the Bastards - at this point it feels like an Xkcd for Very Bad Things, but I digress - [Part One: The Deadliest School in History](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2N77mwUI0pDOBOP6gIknkU) does a pretty good job of covering the School of the Americas
They also have a few on Bernays because of course they do
It's not pesticides, it's everything. Everything from slavery laws to workers rights, environmental regulations, health and safety regulations. The ruling class has conspired to evade those regulations and crush local competition for 100+ years, by offshoring and globalizing their abuses and exploitation.
More banana varieties. The reason Panama Disease was so successful is because of the practice of cloning. Every single crop is the same genetics. Researchers warned that starting over with the Cavendish would result in the exact same thing again and the clear solution was to stop cloning the exact same plant and grow more types of bananas (there are more than 1,000 species of banana and tens of thousands of varieties around the world).
Now we're dealing with TR4 because of the Cavendish being grown in the exact same way but with an even heavier reliance on pesticides, slavery, and violent control over local power.
I don't eat bananas I can buy in Europe, not after doing some travels. They are extremely bland, doesn't matter where I buy them. Now when traveling in exotic countries, what a beautiful experience to taste one!
That was a fun bit of trivia I learned from Balatro - the Gros Michel has a one in six chance of being destroyed after a round. However, if it is destroyed (the game displays Extinct! when it perishes), then the Cavendish can appear randomly in the shop and has a one in one-thousand chance of being destroyed.
That's not really true. Most pesticides have a PHI (pre-harvest interval) where they will be broken down by microbs or sunlight before harvest. There's also pesticides that are more stable and thus can't be used on plants meant for human consumption, but even then most of those do not last very long in the soil. Microbes are very efficient at breaking down chemicals.
And then, after all of that, you still have: the solution to pollution is dilution.
What's toxic on a fruit tree for human consumption, is likely not toxic on thousands of cubic yards of dirt or millions of gallons of ground water.
Only if you see the world in black and white and those pesticides being an absolute evil. But if you see it as a complicated tradeoff where whats right for one country can be wrong for another then it's unproblematic.
Capitalism is the most effective driver of progress known.
Capitalism has lifted enormous numbers of people out of absolute poverty and is a great positive for the world.
Inequality is an unavoidable side-effect of capitalism.
The optimal risk:benefit tradeoff depends on the resources you have available.
It can be rational behavior for a poor person to take greater risks with their health than a rich person, because the value of wealth has strongly diminishing returns. I personally believe we should have state-enforced wealth redistribution to limit this scenario to a reasonable minimum, but I'm not so naive as to think eliminating it entirely would be the globally optimal solution. In practice, "everybody gets identical protection from pesticides" means "everybody is poor".
Ideally we would all be exemplar citizen of the world direct-democratic federation, careful of avoiding any compromission and bribery in our wonderful system. Ideally we would all always optimize for sustainability, careful to keep our action in contemporary reciprocal mutual benefits, in the extend that we confidently believe also able to bring prosperity and peace to future human generations.
Concretely, my friend, I'm afraid this is not quite the world the power imbalances lead us to.
You cannot blame like this the administration when you make any regulatory mistake such as not knowing a rule or not being able to enforce it in practice.
It is amazing that we have regulations for everything and that when they cannot enforce it, they blame someone else.
Different way of dealing with people depending on who, not what.
That is one reason why I, at least try to, check the label and avoid products with non-EU ingredients.
Also one of my worries with the mercusour trade deal. And any deal that involves meat imports from the US, with specific laxer regulation requirements (at least what Trump would like).
They were never used in EU, what happened was that EU exports the pesticides and then they are used in other countries and then those food products are imported into EU.
So EU makes pesticides that itself bans from being used on their own fields. Which isn't that weird, it isn't the chemical that is banned it is using it as a pesticide that is banned.
[†] https://www.foodwatch.org/fileadmin/-INT/pesticides/banned_p...