Feds Will Take Their Sweet Time Evaluating Pesticide Linked to Bee Deaths

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=2918170">BrunoSINNAH /a>/Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Back in 2010, when I first started writing about the possible link between a ubiquitous class of pesticides called neonicotinoids and declining honeybee health, major media organizations largely ignored the story. Since then, evidence of the link has piled up in peer-reviewed studies—and now the bug killers, marketed by European chemical giants Syngenta and Bayer, are under suspicion for killing birds, too. Finally, big media are taking note. In recent weeks, The New York Times editorial page, NPR’s Dan Charles, and CBS News have all weighed in with reports on the suspect pesticides and their effects on honeybees. Meanwhile, the annual bee die-offs that have come to be known as “colony-collapse disorder” appear to be accelerating.

Here’s that recent CBS report:

Where is the Environmental Protection Agency in all of this? Neonics took a famously dodgy path through the agency’s registration process—and a Bayer-funded study purporting to show that the pesticides are harmless to bees, which the EPA had required as a condition for registration, ended up being rejected as bad science by the EPA’s own scientists. Stung, so to speak, by the uproar, the EPA announced in 2011 that it would review the registration of one prominent neonic, Bayer’s clothianidin, “given the concern about clothianidin and other neonicotinoid pesticides and the EPA’s dedication to pollinator protection.”

Neonics are used on a land mass as much as twice as big as California.

Well, given the weight of evidence that has accumulated since 2011 on the pesticides’ harm, can we expect the EPA to ban or at least restrict them anytime soon? No. The agency is sticking to its guns—not in defense of honeybees, but rather in defense of the chemicals that appear to be killing them. Last week, CBS News “checked in” with EPA about its review. The agency’s response: it “should be completed in five years.” Which means at least another half-decade of vast swaths of lands planted with neonic-treated crops.

How much land? Sadly, neither the EPA nor the USDA keeps tabs on pesticide use, so I asked Christian Krupke, an agricultural entomologist at Purdue who has published research implicating neonics in declining bee health, to estimate. His response, via email:

Virtually 100% of corn seed is treated with neonics—that is nearly 100 million acres, add in conservatively 65% of soybeans, all canola, most cotton, most wheat, many smaller acreage crops, and I generally come to a number in the 150-200 million acre range altogether. But it is admittedly not an exact number. In any case, it’s an awful lot of land.

The entire state of California occupies 100 million acres, so we’re talking about a a land mass equivalent to as much as twice the size of the Golden State.

 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate