This has to be one of the most draconian and utterly stupid directives to come out of Brussels. If it goes through in its current form it will mean that EU farmers will lose as much as 85per cent of the active ingredients currently used in agricultural pesticides.

The word pesticide is much vilified but if you call them plant medicines and explain that things like anti-bacterial kitchen spray and fly killer are pesticides which exist in every household then it does not sound so bad.

The way pesticides are currently licensed is on a risk based analysis but the proposal is to change it to a hazard based one.

This means that items such as coffee, toothpaste and alcohol will all come under this legislation, as well as every product currently under every kitchen sink in the country. Water is hazardous if you drink too much of it!

I am not suggesting that coffee or alcohol will be banned, but the green lobby has put everything into this legislation in the hope that the watered down version still gets what they want.

This will effectively bring to an end agriculture in Europe as we know it, with yields dropping by up to 50per cent and certain crops being unable to be grown. Sixty per cent of fruit and vegetables will rot before it reaches the shop shelves and vast areas of the UK will become scrubland.

One of the ingredients which this ban includes is triazoles which control fungal disease in wheat. I can show you some wheat which I have been unable to spray and it looks sick and will not yield well.

Triazoles also appear in products such as athletes foot treatment and other fungal curatives.

Some people may think that this is a good thing, but what will happen is that food prices will rocket and we will end up importing most of our food, which will of course have been treated with the very products that the EU has banned.

The issue of food security and food shortages around the world is on the news almost every night, and with world stocks at less than 60 days, unless we have all the tools available to us the situation will get much worse. There is also an issue here with food miles – imported food is laden with them.

It takes between 10 and 12 years to get new plant protection products licensed in the EU, but in the USA it takes only 18 months to two years, so all the investment is being directed away from the EU.

The organic lobby is right behind this, but if all farmers were to be organic we would starve and anyway there are naturally occurring carcinogens such as sooty moulds and mycotoxins which remain on organic food but are taken out by sprays.

I am currently trying to organise a lobbying trip to Brussels to let MEPs know the serious nature of these proposals and I urge anyone with an interest in keeping food costs down and the countryside looking the way it does, to write or email their MEP to express their concerns.

Farmers Weekly Magazine has launched a Save Our Sprays campaign, which includes an e-petition to present to the European Parliament in the autumn. To sign the petition visit www.fwi.co.uk