Save The Bees (And The Humans)
Neonic pesticides threaten bees and (some more than others) humans.
This weekend saw a protest in my former town against harmful ‘neonic’ pesticides. These pesticides impact bees’ memories and learning, causing problems for them when they forage for food. The chemicals get into the pollen and nectar, so are transferred to whole bee colonies when individual worker bees fly back to the hive. Indeed, a report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services states that: neonicotinoid insecticides have “lethal and sublethal effects on bees.”
Why Is This Important?
We rely on bees to pollinate many of the plants we use for human food production.
The bee population is thought to have reduced by a third in the past 10 years.
Bees’ ability to forage for food and reproduce can be damaged by just a single exposure to neonicotinoid pesticides.
You Can’t Use Them - Except When You Can!
Neonicotinoid pesticides, which contain the active ingredients thiamethoxam, imidacloprid or clothianidinwere, were banned for outdoor use by the European Commission in 2018 in order to protect bees and other pollinators. (They are still legal in Canada and many states in the USA). However, emergency exemptions were permitted in the EU, allowing the use of these harmful pesticides by some European growers.
In the UK, which left the EU in 2020, a similar series of exemptions have meant that neonic chemicals are still used across British farmland under the guise of ‘protecting crops’. Indeed, the UK government has now allowed the emergency use of banned neonicotinoid pesticides in England for the third consecutive year.
The protest near me in Newark-on-Trent, UK, was because British Sugar, who have a large manufacturing plant in the town, have been given an exemption by the British government to use neonicotinoid pesticides on the sugar beet crop.
To put the scale of the danger of these chemicals in perspective, Professor Dave Goulson, Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, explains:
“One teaspoon of the neonicotinoid is enough to deliver a lethal dose to 1.25 billion honeybees. That’s about 125 tonnes of honey bees, enough to fill 4 long wheel base trucks of dead bees. Just before the ban we were applying 110 tonnes of neonics to the British landscape every year.”
Questionable Efficacy
John Tooker, an entomologist at Penn State University, says the benefits of such pesticides are highly questionable and that crop yields are often not improved through their use.
“These insecticides are not helping the productivity of crops on fields – it seems an amazing effort to blanket all these acres with something that doesn’t have a return on investment. These seeds are marketed so well to farmers that they become scared they will have a catastrophic outbreak of pests if they don’t use them, even though this is unlikely.
Double Standards, Colonial Echoes
To make matters worse, while the EU may have banned these chemicals from their own soils (with occasional exemptions which are bad enough), it transpires that they are fine and dandy about selling these harmful pesticides to middle and lower income countries who don’t have the same legislation to protect the pollinator (and human!) population. Claire Nasike, of Greenpeace Africa, condemns this as:
“[T]he highest form of double standards, exhibited by these EU countries. They are prioritising profits at the expense of the people and the planet. (Busby, 2021. The Guardian).
In the three months after the EU ban came into force, Unearthed, the investigative arm of Greenpeace, and Swiss NGO Public Eye discovered that 3,900 tonnes of banned neonicotinoid pesticides were heading out of the EU and UK for countries such as Brazil, Ghana, Iran, Russia, Singapore, Mali, Ukraine, Indonesia, Argentina and South Africa.
Indeed, the amount of insecticide destined for Brazil (which is thought to be home to 20% of the world’s remaining biodiversity), was enough to spray the entire surface area of New Zealand!
So what can we do?
Armchair Activism
Simple Activism
Get clued up on the issues:
Find out more about bees and how to encourage more bees in your local area.
Impact in the largest destination of EU shipped neonicotinoids - Brazil.
Step It Up A Notch
Sign a petition against these pesticides - from the EU, to the US, Canada and the UK there’s a variety of active petitions to choose from.
Friends of the Earth ‘Shape the future of the countryside’ petition.
Serious Activism
Write a letter/email (templates below) to your local politician/Environment Secretary making your views known about both the continued exemptions and use of neonicotinoids as well as the sale of them to lower income countries. Share widely.
Use this template for the UK. And this link to find your MP.
(Templates adapted from https://www.standbybees.co.uk/letter-to-mp)
Join or initiate an action yourself to make your communities’ views known about the importance of protecting our pollinators.