Neonicotinoid fiasco: How American NGOs turn Europe against science, push EU towards insecticide ban
April 19, 2017
From: Genetic Literacy Project
[GLP Editor’s note: Matt Ridley is a columnist for The Times (UK), a member of the House of Lords and the author of “The Evolution of Everything”.]
The European Commission’s blinkered approach to insecticides shows how basic science is losing out to lobbyists and bureaucrats
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In Britain, for example, the study finds that farmers have more than quadrupled the number of insecticide applications on oil-seed rape (from 0.7 to 3.4 per growing season), but pest pressure has increased. Meanwhile, recent studies have demonstrated that declines among wild bees are driven mostly by land use changes and have not increased since neonics were introduced in the 1990s. In fact, a 2015 study published in Nature Communications found that those wild bees most often found in agricultural areas — and probably most exposed to neonics — are “common” and “dominant”.
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