Regulation Fail: The EU’s Neonicotinoid Ban is an Ecological Disaster
May 15, 2017
From: Forbes
Pesticide Regulation In The European Union: The Worst Has Become The Norm
- The kicker was that the ban produced no benefit–zero, none, zip–to bees or other beneficial insects–which was, after all, the whole point of the wrong-headed exercise.
- in 2016 oilseed rape acreage in the UK fell for the fourth straight year and UK farmers lost £18.4 million and almost 28,800 hectares of crops due to the ban.
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In February, I wrote about how the European Union has rigged the evaluation of whether state-of-the-art neonicotinoid pesticides (“neonics”) are “bee-safe” by using a “Bee Guidance Review Document” whose test conditions were made deliberately impossible to satisfy. (For those of you just tuning in, neonics, introduced in the 1990’s, are currently the most widely used class of pesticides. Mainly applied as seed coatings to crops, they are taken up into the plant and selectively control only the pests that actually damage or destroy crops while minimizing exposure to humans, animals and beneficial insects—including bees.)
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After Ridley broke the story in the Times, investigative reporters at Politico EU were able to get hold of a copy of the report and posted it on their website. The JRC’s assessment documents reveals nothing less than a regulation-induced calamity. With neonic seed treatments withdrawn from the market, farmers were forced to massively increase spraying with older, much more ecologically harmful pesticides that significantly increased the costs to farmers but still couldn’t adequately cope with mounting pest pressures.
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