PARIS: France’s winter wheat harvest could shrink by over a tenth if farmers meet targets to halve pesticide use, said a study Thursday highlighting the challenge of feeding Earth’s growing population.

The estimates come from field trials where scientists compared yields to cuts in pesticide use.

Extrapolated for the country as a whole, halving pesticide use could mean a decline in winter wheat production of two to three million tonnes per year, the researchers said.

This amounts to a reduction of five to 13 per cent of national production of winter wheat, and 15pc of French wheat exports.

Halving pesticide use “may not be profitable for farmers”, the team wrote in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.

With projections of an extra two billion mouths to feed by 2050 and a shortage of new farmland, increasing crop yield per hectare has never been as urgent.

Pesticides played a crucial role in doubling the average yield of cereal crops worldwide from 1960 to 1990, but their impact on human health and biodiversity have made them controversial.

European farmers are encouraged to limit pesticide use, and French environmental policy targets a 50pc reduction by 2018.

Now researchers have calculated what the impact of such a policy is likely to be.

They used data from 176 experimental farming plots from four sites in France that compared yields for wheat grown with pesticides, with less pesticides, or with none.