DESPITE THE drive for Brexit, not all ideas that come out of Brussels are bad – and there is a strong case for the government to take on some of these after the UK exits the EU.

The call in the report on agri-food markets for legislation to outlaw unfair trading practices is welcome, and the UK could use this thinking to give the Grocery Code Adjudicator more teeth to investigate unfair treatment of farmers.

Also welcome, in a world where food scares are whipped up by pressure groups, is a call from the commissioner for human and food safety for decision making around science rather than emotion. Like Anne Glover, the Scottish professor effectively sacked by the European Commission president, Jean Claude Juncker, from her role as scientific adviser because she backed science, Vytenis Andriukaitis came to his post with real scientific credentials.

He is a former heart surgeon and is the Lithuanian commissioner – a country that has embraced science and technology since it escaped communism. This makes him well capable of mounting a cogent argument, and it seems he is ready to take on the 'precautionary principle' being used to block science.

In a recent speech, Andriukaitis said that over two years in the job he had been amazed at public options when confronted with science. A good example, and it was one on his list, is the question mark over the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, the world's most widely used herbicide. On the slimmest of slim evidence, pressure groups have been pressing for a ban. This ignores 99% of science, and the fact that you would have to eat fields of crops at one sitting to be exposed to even a theoretical risk. Yet the clamour for a ban continues. This is probably because an attack on glyphosate is seen by pressure groups as an attack on the agrochemical giants, and on Monsanto, which they dislike most of all.

Andriukaitis said this anti-science view, not only over chemicals but all new technology, does not fit with the need for agriculture and food production to become more efficient to meet the needs of a growing global population. It also does not fit with the natural desire of people to spend less on food, so that they will have more disposable income for other things.

For now, they achieve that by the squeeze on supply chain margins, but they have now been squeezed so hard that technology is the only way to reduce prices further. For years pressure groups have urged politicians to ban scientific advances. They argue that this does not fit with the green utopia they want, and in response to what they perceive to be public opinion politicians have given in.

Andriukaitis is arguing that this is wrong, and that politicians need to make a stand for science and technology. This is exactly what Anne Glover said, but as Andriukaitis is a commissioner and not a Brussels civil servant he cannot be dismissed by Juncker for upsetting the pressure groups the European Commission has been in awe of for too long.

The food safety commissioner said the key question was whether people wanted to believe well thought out and rigorously tested science, or what he described as 'emotional and one-sided' arguments passed around on social media. It seems the latter is the case, and that is a big challenge for politicians. This is particularly so in Europe, where there is more resistance to science than in any other country.

Stating that this is happening is easy, but changing a political and media mindset is difficult. This goes back to the old argument about not being able to win an emotional argument with science. Andriukaitis admits conspiracy theories and opposition to multinational companies abounds, and he has no magic formula to change this. Indeed his conclusion was that he has 'big doubts about the future' in Europe.

Brexit is of course an opportunity to change this, to ally the UK with science elsewhere and escape the approach of Brussels, which puts the precautionary principle and pressure group views ahead of logic. It would be encouraging if ministers set out a vision of a technically driven, globally competitive agriculture in the UK, embracing responsible science to deliver for farmers, the environment and consumers. However as Andriukaitis made clear, breaking the grip of pressure groups that make their money from scare stories will not be easy.