In news on this long dormant thread, the European Union may have decided to stop using half measures, reports The Guardian:
The European Union will ban the world’s most widely used insecticides from all fields due to the serious danger they pose to bees.
The ban on neonicotinoids, approved by member nations on Friday, is expected to come into force by the end of 2018 and will mean they can only be used in closed greenhouses. …
Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed, in part, on the widespread use of pesticides. The EU banned the use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops that attract bees, such as oil seed rape, in 2013.
But in February, a major report from the European Union’s scientific risk assessors (Efsa) concluded that the high risk to both honeybees and wild bees resulted from any outdoor use, because the pesticides contaminate soil and water. This leads to the pesticides appearing in wildflowers or succeeding crops. A recent study of honey samples revealed global contamination by neonicotinoids.
One of the objections, noted in the same article:
The UK’s National Farmers’ Union (NFU) said the ban was regrettable and not justified by the evidence. Guy Smith, NFU deputy president, said: “The pest problems that neonicotinoids helped farmers tackle have not gone away. There is a real risk that these restrictions will do nothing measurable to improve bee health, while compromising the effectiveness of crop protection.”
Careful measurement of bee community health over the next decade or more will now be necessary in order to evaluate the results of the ban, and that means tracking all the other variables involved, such as climate, other widespread human-generated chemicals, and any replacements for the banned substance which may be developed and marketed.
That’s a lot of work and resources.
Melissa Breyer on Treehugger notes a disturbing development in the United States:
Meanwhile, the United States EPA is considering an application by agrochemical giant Syngenta to dramatically escalate the use of the harmful neonicotinoid pesticide, thiamethoxam. If approved, notes The Center for Biological Diversity, the application would allow the highly toxic pesticide to be sprayed directly on 165 million acres of wheat, barley, corn, sorghum, alfalfa, rice and potato.
Will the EPA under Administrator Pruitt abdicate its responsibility?
