The Dreaded ‘Green Blob’ Is The Most Dire Threat To Bees
September 24, 2014
From: Forbes
If neonicotinoid pesticides were banned–as activists are demanding–U.S. farmers’ productivity would drop and they would resort to more toxic chemicals, the nation’s agricultural economy would be damaged, food prices would increase, and bees would be much worse off.
Magazine editor and satirist H.L. Mencken was right that there is an easy solution to every human problem—and that it is invariably neat, plausible, and wrong. In that category is the insistence of anti-pesticide crusaders and the organic food industry that federal regulators should ban neonicotinoids (“neonics” for short), the mostly widely used class of pesticides.
Activists commonly cite two justifications for such a ban: the presence of pesticide residues in foods and the supposedly detrimental effect of the chemicals on bees.
Neither of these rationales is valid.
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