One of the major debates in recent years has been about organic farming and whether we should move to a pesticide-free agriculture. I still have a lot of respect for what the organic industry does. It’s developed an industry that has added a lot of value to the food chain and made us all think about where food is produced and issues like food quality, traceability and welfare. My concern about the organic sector is that it has been oversold.

Often, people are being misled to a degree about what organic actually is. Organic is a system of production and we should be careful about what that actually means. For example, I think the Food Standards Agency is quite right to say there’s no real evidence to suggest there’s any major nutritional health differences between organic and conventional food products. Nor is organic totally pesticide-free; if you look at how organic systems operate, there is some use of non-synthetic pesticides. Antibiotics do get used, when required, in organic animal livestock systems. A lot of the feed that’s fed into organic livestock is actually conventionally produced using pesticides.

So organic is not quite what it seems. It’s a compromise system that has benefits associated with it, but it is not the answer for the global food security problems that we face. To some extent, people in the organic industry have been pushed into a corner where they need to keep pushing this message that conventional forms of agriculture are potentially dangerous to the environment and public health and will cause bigger problems for climate change, pollution etc. I feel quite strongly that those claims aren’t true.

Agricultural chemicals are the most rigorously regulated in the world. We use chemicals in our everyday life to clean our floors, shampoo our hair and so on. But while we don’t tend to worry about those chemicals, there is a lot of concern about pesticides. Yet on average it takes 10-15 years to get the active substance which is the core component of pesticide approved in Europe, a process of development, testing and approval that costs about £200million. There are about 200 to 250 separate parts of public health environmental safety, rigorous tests which obviously involve a great deal of time, resources and expertise and companies have to do this before they can get any products approved. It is misleading to suggest, as some do, that pesticides are not tested properly.

The industry has changed a lot in recent decades. A lot of the products you now see in the marketplace are very different from those that were used in the Sixties and Seventies. Moreover, farmers now use a tiny volume of modern pesticides compared to the substances that they would have used 20 years ago. The farmer will use a GPS tracking system and a very up-to-date and modern spraying system so that the product is applied only where it is needed and using only the volume that’s required to do the job. The idea that farmers go round and spray these chemicals all over the place is ridiculous and misleading. These products are expensive and farmers want to make sure they get the maximum benefit from the smallest amount of usage.

There are also many integrated crop management systems that look at whether pesticides are actually needed. The result is that we’re using smaller volumes than we did in the past.

While new technologies will enable us to reduce and refine chemical usage, we cannot avoid the fact that we could lose 40 per cent of the world’s crops if we don’t have effective crop-protection methods. Nor is this a static playing field. The pests that we’re dealing with emerge and become resistant to various techniques all the time. With climate change being the real problem, new pests emerge so we have to come up with new systems to deal with them. We need the full toolbox of crop-protection techniques so that the fully grown plants are able to be used as food; if you empty that toolbox down because you’ve got an environment where everyone demonises the use of pesticides, you’ve got very few product options left and a farmer can’t deal with pests as they move to new areas due to warmer weather or become resistant to existing solutions.

Another argument that is often raised is that as oil supplies run out we won’t be able to continue with the current chemical-dependent agriculture. Agriculture is currently an oil-based industry primarily and oil is an important part of the process of developing an active substance that you can apply in a liquid form to crops. However, there’s nothing stopping our industry in time looking at other alternative fossil fuels, but it’s not a pressing economic issue at the present time. Fuels are starting to be made from crops so it’s possible we’ll start making agricultural chemicals from plants in years to come. Regardless, pesticides are much less of an issue for climate change than fertilisers.

Let’s not forget that the organic food production system also has a carbon footprint. A lot of organic foods are transported over long distances and they’re using fossil fuels to do that. The organic system works best when it’s producing for a local market, but because of the way the industry has developed, to actually sustain itself it has had to become a global industry in the same way as conventional food production, which has an impact on the climate.

A major concern I have is to ensure that in Europe we don’t establish a regulatory system by which a lot of the key players, big companies that are leaders in crop-protection technology, turn their back on Europe and look outside because the regulatory system is such that they’re unable to bring new products to the market. At the moment, we’ve got is a lot of anti-pesticide and anti-biotechnology sentiment.

However, we desperately need to embrace this new technology, particularly in the light of climate change. For example, people often cite France in 2003 as an example of what the future might hold. But while we tend to focus on the fact that thousands of people died during that summer heatwave, people forget that crop production dropped by 30 per cent. If summers like that become the norm, we’re going to need technology to counter that. I think Europe has to look at it’s whole regulatory system to allow for these developments - and quickly. We do not have time on our side and we cannot put our head in the sand and say we don’t want these technologies.

Food is going to get more expensive and the way we produce food is very much down to the use of fertilizers, pesticides and modern farming techniques. Without these methods, we will restrict how much food is available and prices will continue to rise both for the raw ingredients used by food manufacturers and for the basic foods that we buy in the supermarket. It’s time we put aside the many prejudices about modern technology so that we can use it provide us with the food we need in the future.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Dominic Dyer is chief executive of the UK Crop Protection Association.