Tag Archives: bayer

Trump Somehow Found Time Today to Meet With Monsanto Execs

by BeatrizVSGP Posted on January 12, 2017

Mother Jones

Amid the furor surrounding allegations of covert ties with Russian intelligence figures as well as his first press conference since winning the election, President-elect Donald Trump found time in his hectic Wednesday schedule to meet with two towering figures in the agriculture world, reports Fox Business Daily. But the main conversation topic wasn’t the job opening atop the US Department of Agriculture, the sole cabinet spot awaiting an appointment from Trump.

Rather, the meeting involved German chemical giant Bayer’s $66 billion buyout of US seed/agrichemical giant Monsanto—a deal that will have to pass antitrust muster with Trump’s Department of Justice (more on that here). Fox reports that Bayer CEO Werner Baumann and his Monsanto counterpart Hugh Grant met with the incoming president at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to promote the merger. In an email to the news organization, a Monsanto spokesperson confirmed that the two execs “had a productive meeting with President-Elect Trump and his team to share their views on the future of the agriculture industry and its need for innovation.”

Baumann and Grant have plenty to be concerned about regarding possible antitrust obstacles to their mega-deal. As I’ve reported before, a combined Bayer-Monsanto would own 29 percent of the global seed market, and 25 percent of the global pesticide market. And if the pending merger between agribiz goliaths Dow and DuPont also wins approval, three enormous companies—the above two combined firms, plus Syngenta (itself recently taken over by a Chinese chemical conglomerate)—would sell about 59 percent of the globe’s seeds and 64 percent of its pesticides. In this post, I tease out how such concentrated power can harm farmers and consumers alike.

And as The Wall Street Journal reports, opposition to these mergers has arisen even in rival agribusiness circles, including among the motley crew of execs and aligned GOP farm-state pols who served on Trump’s rural advisory committee during the campaign. Iowa corn, pork, and ethanol magnate Bruce Rastetter, a member of that committee and a leading candidate for the USDA post, told The Journal he “plans to raise his concerns about the mergers directly with Mr. Trump in the near future.” Rastetter is tightly aligned with Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, whom Trump has picked to serve as ambassador to China.

As with everything else he does, Trump seems intent on plunging these momentous decisions—on both the future of the seed market and the leadership of the USDA—into a swirling sea of chaos and drama.

This article is from:

Trump Somehow Found Time Today to Meet With Monsanto Execs

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Somehow Found Time Today to Meet With Monsanto Execs

Monsanto May Soon Cease to Exist

by JonnaFulford02 Posted on September 13, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

And then there were three?

On Tuesday, marriage negotiations between seed/pesticide giant Monsanto and its suitor, German behemoth Bayer, got hotter than a corn field at high noon in late summer. Bayer sweetened its offer to $56.5 billion Tuesday afternoon, just as Monsanto’s Board of Directors was scheduled to meet to consider the offer, according to Bloomberg News. The companies could agree to terms as early as Wednesday—but the merger could “still fall apart,” the news service reported, adding that “if successful, it would lead to the biggest deal this year and the largest ever by a German company.”

In its current incarnation, Bayer is mainly a pharmaceutical company, with interests in prescription drugs, over-the-counter staples like aspirin, and animal medicines. But it also has a large division devoted to selling seeds and pesticides—and it has been itching for months to expand those business lines by taking over Monsanto.

This deal would represent a massive step in a remarkable recent run of mergers among the handful of companies that dominate those markets. Late last year, Dow and DuPont—two US chemical behemoths with large agribusiness divisions—agreed to merge. A few months later, after fending off an aggressive and persistent bid from Monsanto, Swiss seed/pesticide titan Syngenta jumped into the the clutches of ChemChina, a conglomerate owned by the Chinese government.

Here’s what the agribusiness landscape will look like if Bayer buys Monsanto and these mergers clear regulatory hurdles—a big if. These charts are updated from my December post on the Dow-DuPont merger.

var embedDeltas=”100″:664,”200″:488,”300″:444,”400″:444,”500″:444,”600″:400,”700″:400,”800″:400,”900″:400,”1000″:400,chart=document.getElementById(“datawrapper-chart-bQVIy”),chartWidth=chart.offsetWidth,applyDelta=embedDeltasMath.min(1000, Math.max(100*(Math.floor(chartWidth/100)), 100))||0,newHeight=applyDelta;chart.style.height=newHeight+”px”;

var embedDeltas=”100″:556,”200″:461,”300″:400,”400″:400,”500″:400,”600″:383,”700″:383,”800″:383,”900″:383,”1000″:383,chart=document.getElementById(“datawrapper-chart-wtmJp”),chartWidth=chart.offsetWidth,applyDelta=embedDeltasMath.min(1000, Math.max(100*(Math.floor(chartWidth/100)), 100))||0,newHeight=applyDelta;chart.style.height=newHeight+”px”;

However, such hyper-consolidation of markets that are so crucial to the global food supply may be too much for US and EU antitrust authorities to digest. The European Commission recently threw doubt on the Dow-DuPont deal by halting its process for approving the merger, pending more information from the two companies.

Back in August, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) announced the US Senate Judiciary Committee would soon hold hearings on the deal, based on concerns among farmers that the “sudden consolidation in the industry” would give remaining players the leverage to raise seed and pesticide prices. Earlier this week, 250 members of the National Farmers Union descended on Washington, DC, to protest the recent consolidation wave, complaining that it reduced competition and raises the price of seeds and chemicals “while farmers are already being squeezed by weak commodity markets,” Reuters reports.

But it’s the executive branch, mainly the Department of Justice, that has ultimate authority on whether Dow-DuPont and possible Bayer-Monsano tie-up passes US regulatory muster—and it has shown recent willingness to halt mergers in the agribiz space. Just two weeks ago, the DOJ sued to halt a relatively small deal between Monsanto and farm-equipment giant John Deere. Monsanto had agreed to sell its precision-planting arm—involving machines that allow farmers to plant seeds at variable rates across fields—to Deere for $190 million. Not so fast, said the DOJ in its complaint, noting that the deal would give Deere 86 percent of the US market for these tools.

As I noted back in the July, the Democratic Party, after years of acquiescence to a long wave of mergers in the agribusiness space and in corporate America at large, is recently showing showing signs that it thinks enough is enough. Even if Bayer-Monsanto gains support from those companies’ shareholders, the deal will likely have to hoe a tough row before its vast profit potential can be harvested.

Original article:  

Monsanto May Soon Cease to Exist

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Monsanto May Soon Cease to Exist

Disturbing New Evidence About What Common Pesticides Can Do to Brains

by AdriannHaggard Posted on April 13, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

For defense against the fungal pathogens that attack crops—think the blight that bedeviled Irish potato fields in the 19th century—farmers turn to fungicides. They’re widely sprayed on fruit, vegetable, and nut crops, and in the past decade, they’ve become quite common in the corn and soybean fields (see here and here for more). But as the use of fungicides has ramped up in recent years, some scientists are starting to wonder: What are these chemicals doing to the ecosystems they touch, and to us?

A new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications adds to a disturbing body of evidence that fungicides might be doing more than just killing fungi. For the study, a team of University of North Carolina Neuroscience Center researchers led by Mark Zylka subjected mouse cortical neuron cultures—which are similar in cellular and molecular terms to the the human brain—to 294 chemicals “commonly found in the environment and on food.” The idea was to see whether any of them triggered changes that mimicked patterns found in brain samples from people with autism, advanced age, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Eight chemicals fit the bill, the researchers found. Of them, the two most widely used are from a relatively new class of fungicides called “quinone outside inhibitors,” which have surged in use since being introduced in US farm fields in the early 2000s: pyraclostrobin and trifloxystrobin.

Now, it’s important to note, Zylka told me in an interview, that in vitro research like the kind his team conducted for this study is only the first step in determining whether a chemical poses risk to people. The project identified chemicals that can cause harm to brain cells in a lab setting, but it did not establish that they harm human brains as they’re currently used. Nailing that down will involve careful epidemiological studies, Zylka said: Scientists will have to track populations that have been exposed to the chemicals—say farm workers—to see if they show a heightened propensity for brain disorders, and also test people who eat foods with residues of suspect chemicals to see if they show up in their bodies at significant levels.

That work remains to be done, Zylka said. “What’s most disturbing to me is that we’ve allowed these chemicals to be widely used, widely found on food and in the environment, without knowing more about their potential effects,” he said.

How widely are they used? The paper points to US Geological Survey data for pyraclostrobin, a fungicide that landed on the UNC team’s list of chemicals that trigger “changes in vitro that are similar to those seen in brain samples from humans with autism, advanced age and neurodegeneration.” It’s marketed by the German chemical giant BASF’s US unit under the brand name Headline, for use on corn, soybeans, citrus fruit, dried beans, and more. BASF calls Headline the “nation’s leading fungicide.” The USGS chart below shows just how rapidly it has become a blockbuster on US farm fields.

Use of pyraclostrobin in the United States has spiked since 2002.

Then there’s trifloxystrobin, which also made the UNC team’s list. Marketed by another German chemical giant, Bayer, trifloxystrobin, too, boasts an impressive USGS chart, reproduced below.

US Trifloxystrobin use has boomed since 1999. USGS

In an emailed statement, a BASF spokeswoman wrote that cell-tissue studies like Zylka’s “have not demonstrated relevance compared with results from studies conducted on live animals.” She added: “While the study adds to the debate of some scientific questions, it provides no evidence that the chemicals contribute to the development of some diseases of the central nervous system. This publication has no impact on the established safety of pyraclostrobin when used according to label instructions in agricultural settings.” A Bayer spokesman told me that the company’s scientists are looking into the Zylka study and “don’t have any initial feedback to offer right now.” He added that “our products are rigorously tested and their safety and efficacy is our focus.”

As Zylka’s team points out, both of these chemicals turn up on food samples in the US Department of Agriculture’s routine testing program. Pyraclostrobin residues, according to USDA data compiled by Pesticide Action Network, have been found on spinach, kale, and grapes, among others, in recent years, while trifloxystrobin has been detected on grapes, cherry tomatoes, and sweet bell peppers. Again, there hasn’t been sufficient research to establish whether these traces are causing us harm, Zylka stressed, but since they are entering out bodies through food, he thinks more research is imperative.

Meanwhile, a disturbing picture of the ecosystem impacts is emerging. These same chemicals also leave the farm via water. A 2012 US Geological Survey study found pyraclostrobin in 40 percent of streams in three farming-intensive areas. In another 2012 USGS study, researchers looked for a variety of pesticides in the bed sediments of ponds located within amphibian habitats in California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, and Oregon. Pyraclostrobin was the most often-detected chemical of all, turning up in more than 40 percent of tested sites.

Studies suggest that as the fungicides leach out into the larger environment, they’re harmful to more than just fungi. Oklahoma State researchers found BASF’s pyraclostrobin-based fungicide Headline deadly to tadpoles at levels frequently encountered in ponds. And a 2013 study by German and Swiss researchers found that frogs sprayed with Headline at the rate recommended on the label die within an hour—a stunning result for a chemical meant to kill funguses, not frogs. I wrote about the study when it came out. “These studies were performed under unrealistic laboratory conditions,” a BASF spokeswoman told me at the time. “The study design neither reflects conditions of realistic agricultural use in practice nor the natural behavior of the animals.”

Then there are honeybees. In a 2013 study, a team of USDA researchers found pyraclostrobin and several other fungicides and insecticides in the pollen of beehives placed near farm fields—and that bees fed pyraclostrobin-laced pollen were nearly three times more likely to die from common gut pathogen called Nosema ceranae than the unexposed control group (more here).

Meanwhile, the industry is enthusiastically marketing these products. “Headline fungicide helps growers control diseases and improve overall Plant Health. That means potentially higher yields, better ROI and, ultimately, better profits,” BASF”s website states. “It can help secure a family’s future, fund a college education, finance an equipment upgrade, or maybe buy just a bit more of a vacation for the whole family.” Such supposed benefits aside, I wish we knew more about the environmental and public-health costs of these increasingly ubiquitous chemicals.

Originally posted here – 

Disturbing New Evidence About What Common Pesticides Can Do to Brains

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Disturbing New Evidence About What Common Pesticides Can Do to Brains

Why the EPA’s recent pesticide battle could be a big deal

by Aisha69O9866892 Posted on March 4, 2016

Why the EPA’s recent pesticide battle could be a big deal

By on 4 Mar 2016commentsShare

A battle between the U.S. government and a chemical giant revealed a fundamental flaw in the way we control pesticides — one that could be allowing thousands of unsafe chemicals to go undetected.

In a rare show of regulatory muscle, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a Notice of Intent on Tuesday, announcing that it planned to cancel the sale of products that included a pesticide called flubendiamide as an active ingredient. The EPA has been monitoring these products, manufactured mainly by the company Bayer CropScience LP (and also by the smaller Japanese company Nichino America, Inc.), over the past few years. Studies have shown the pesticide was breaking down into a different, more deadly compound that was killing mussels and other invertebrates that fish rely on for food — a problem that the agency deemed serious enough to warrant the banning of all products of its kind.

The EPA’s move to ban the products is a novel one, and could signal a change in the way it regulates pesticides, particularly with issuing “conditional registrations,” a loophole that allows pesticides that have not undergone otherwise required safety testing to enter the market. Conditional registrations aren’t uncommon at all — according to a 2013 report released by the Natural Resources Defense Council, as much as 65 percent of more than 16,000 pesticides were first approved by the EPA for the market by way of conditional registrations.

Advertisement

David Epstein, a senior entomologist at the USDA’s Office of Pest Management Policy, says that these conditional registrations exist to aid growers of crops like vegetables, fruits, and nuts keep away pests. And in theory, they can be a beneficial aid to help smaller growers — but the process isn’t perfect.

“It’s a risk-benefit analysis,” Epstein told Grist, explaining that registrants are evaluated for risk in terms of things like human health, environmental safety, and non-target effects, and then they weigh the pesticide’s potential benefits to farmers. Epstein said that flubendiamide, a pesticide he’s used himself on crops, is an important tool for farmers to keep away harmful pests. The conditional registration process, he said, is a way to help growers get pesticides like these more quickly.

“It’s an evolving process,” he said. “Mistakes are made and corrected, and then we and move on.”

But there’s a big problem, according to Nathan Donley, a staff scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity and an expert on pesticide regulations.

“The EPA has no way of tracking these conditional registrations,” he told Grist. “During the normal regulatory process, the public can review docs and comment. But in conditional registration, it all happens backdoor; the public doesn’t get to see.”

Donley argues that the fundamental concept of conditional registration is flawed, and should be shut down until the EPA can better regulate pesticides.

“There’s more than enough pesticides on the market,” said Donley. “If a chemical company can’t demonstrate that its pesticide is safe, then that pesticide shouldn’t be on the market.”

The latest flubendiamide news is only the most recent skirmish in a battle that’s been brewing for months between Bayer, a German chemical giant worth $42 billion that produces the pesticide under the trade name Belt, and the EPA. It all began back in 2008,  when the EPA issued a conditional registration for flubendiamide — the chemical was legal to manufacture, but only under the condition that the companies must produce toxicity data on the impact of its use over the next few years, to fill in gaps in the original risk assessment. The EPA gave Bayer a generous five years to conduct scientific studies to prove that flubendiamide is safe for aquatic invertebrates, or the pesticide would have to go. Bayer agreed that it would voluntarily cancel the products if these stipulations weren’t met.

Seven years later — two years longer than expected — studies conducted by the EPA found that flubendiamide was having adverse effects on aquatic invertebrates. In January, the EPA gave Bayer the sign: a notice that, as they had agreed, Bayer must withdraw its flubendiamide pesticides. But last month, Bayer flat-out refused. In a statement, the company said that it “instead will seek a review of the product’s registration in an administrative law hearing,” asserting that the product was safe. It was a bold move, one that triggered outrage among environmentalists, many of whom demanded that Bayer play by the rules.

Now, it’s a stalemate, with EPA demanding flubendiamide products be banned, and Bayer resisting. But the damage, unfortunately, is already done. In California alone, 42,495 pounds of flubendiamide were sprayed onto 521,140 acres in 2013. In some places, it was applied six times in one year, misted over crops like soybeans, alfalfa, watermelon, almonds, peppers, and tobacco. In many cases, the EPA asserts, it was also being sprayed over wildlife.

The EPA’s notice to Bayer is out in the open, but flubendiamide isn’t leaving yet. According to NPR, Bayer is demanding a hearing before an administrative law judge before it makes any moves. The case has provoked renewed questions about what role the EPA should — and shouldn’t — play in pesticide regulations, and how to prevent unsafe chemicals from being unleashed on the planet.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.Climate on the Mind

A Grist Special Series

Get Grist in your inbox

See original article here:  

Why the EPA’s recent pesticide battle could be a big deal

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why the EPA’s recent pesticide battle could be a big deal

Did Scientists Just Solve The Bee Collapse Mystery?

by LoydSunguxadgb Posted on May 20, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s a hard-knock life, scouring the landscape for pollen to sustain a beehive. Alight upon the wrong field, and you might encounter fungicides, increasingly used on corn and soybean crops, and shown to harm honeybees at tiny levels. Get hauled in to pollinate California’s vast almond groves, as 60 percent of US honeybees do, and you’ll likely make contact with a group of chemicals called adjuvants—allegedly “inert” pesticide additives that have emerged as a prime suspect for a large bee die-off during this year’s almond bloom.

The hardest-to-avoid menace of all might be the neonicotinoid class of pesticides, widely used not only on big Midwestern crops like corn and soybeans but also on cotton, sorghum, sugar beets, apples, cherries, peaches, oranges, berries, leafy greens, tomatoes, and potatoes. They’re even common in yard and landscaping products. I’ve written before about the growing weight of science linking these lucrative pesticides, marketed by European agrichemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, to declining bee health, including the annual die-offs known as colony collapse disorder, which began in the winter of 2005-’06.

Continue Reading »

More: 

Did Scientists Just Solve The Bee Collapse Mystery?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Did Scientists Just Solve The Bee Collapse Mystery?

Not just bad for bees: Neonic pesticides could damage babies’ brains

by NeilMcgehee Posted on December 19, 2013

Not just bad for bees: Neonic pesticides could damage babies’ brains

By

Shutterstock

The fruit and vegetables that Americans bring home and cook up for their families are often laced with pest-killing chemicals known as acetamiprid and imidacloprid, members of the neonicotinoid class.

That sounds gross. Even grosser than these nearly unpronounceable chemical names are new findings out of Europe that the compounds may stunt the development of brains in fetuses and young children.

The discovery, by scientists working with rats for the European Food Safety Authority, has led to calls in Europe to further restrict the use of the neonic pesticides. From a press release put out by the authority:

The [Plant Protection Products and their Residues] Panel found that acetamiprid and imidacloprid may adversely affect the development of neurons and brain structures associated with functions such as learning and memory. It concluded that some current guidance levels for acceptable exposure to acetamiprid and imidacloprid may not be protective enough to safeguard against developmental neurotoxicity and should be reduced.

We say “further restrict” because the use of imidacloprid is already severely restricted in Europe, barred for two years from being used on flowering crops and plants because it kills bees and other pollinators.

In the U.S., by contrast, both chemicals are freely used. Federal government tests have detected imidacloprid on one-fifth of produce sampled, including on 60 percent of broccoli and cauliflower. About 10 percent of produce samples tested positive for acetamiprid, including half of the samples of summer squash.

The New York Times reports that both chemicals are widely used in pesticide products:

Imidacloprid is one of the most popular insecticides, and is used in agricultural and consumer products. It was developed by Bayer, the German chemicals giant, and is the active ingredient in products like Bayer Advanced Fruit, Citrus & Vegetable Insect Control, which can be purchased at stores internationally, including Home Depot in the United States.

Acetamiprid is sold by Nisso Chemical, a German branch of a Japanese company, though it was developed with Bayer’s help. It is used in consumer products like Ortho Flower, Fruit & Vegetable Insect Killer.

The action by European regulators could affect the entire category of neonicotinoid pesticides, however.

James Ramsay, a spokesman for the European Food Safety Authority, which conducted the review, said the agency was recommending a mandatory submission of studies related to developmental neurotoxicity “as part of the authorization process in the E.U.”

“We’re advising that all neonicotinoid substances be evaluated as part of this testing strategy, providing that they show a similar toxicological profile to the two substances we’ve assessed in this opinion,” he said.

Beekeepers, food safety groups, and environmentalists are suing the EPA in an effort to ban neonic insecticides such as these. The new findings out of Europe will create a new sense of urgency for those groups — and hopefully for the federal government, which needs to be doing more to protect Americans and wildlife from the insidious effects of agricultural poisons.


Source
EFSA assesses potential link between two neonicotinoids and developmental neurotoxicity, European Food Safety Authority
EU Officials Warn Of Health Risks From Pesticides Common On U.S. Fruits And Vegetables, Environmental Working Group
European Agency Warns of Risk to Humans in Pesticides Tied to Bee Deaths, The New York Times

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Food

Credit: 

Not just bad for bees: Neonic pesticides could damage babies’ brains

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Not just bad for bees: Neonic pesticides could damage babies’ brains

Bee-killing pesticide companies are pretending to save bees

by bvds34dfsg Posted on June 12, 2013

Bee-killing pesticide companies are pretending to save bees

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Even as bees drop dead around the world after sucking down pesticide-laced nectar, pesticide makers are touting their investments in bee research.

Nearly a third of commercial honeybee colonies in U.S. were wiped out last year, for a complicated array of reasons, scientists say: disease, stress, poor nutrition, mite infestations, and — yes — pesticides. Neonicotinoid pesticides seem to be particularly damaging to bees, so much so that the European Union is moving to ban them (but the U.S. is not).

Now the two main manufacturers of neonicotinoids, Bayer CropScience and Syngenta, are promoting their commitments to bee health, as is agro-giant Monsanto. From a feature story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

Monsanto Co., which two years ago bought an Israeli bee research company, hosts an industry conference on bee health at its headquarters in Creve Coeur this month. Bayer CropScience is building a 5,500-square-foot “bee health center” in North Carolina, and with fellow chemical giant, Syngenta, has developed a “comprehensive action plan” for bee health.

“The beekeeping industry has always crawled on its hands and knees to USDA and universities, begging for help,” said Jerry Hayes, a bee industry veteran recently hired by Monsanto to run its bee research efforts. “Now we have this very large company involved that knows how important bees are to agriculture.”

With a very large company involved, the bees are as good as saved, right?

Not surprisingly, the industry is downplaying the role of insecticides in bee deaths.

For example, Iain Kelly of Bayer CropScience does a suspiciously incomplete job of explaining the scary plight of bees during an interview with North Carolina Public Radio about the company’s new bee research center:

Kelly … says other insects and diseases are invading much of the bee’s natural habitat.

“They have real problems now with pests and pathogens, including viruses and fungal diseases,” Kelly says.

“We’ve lost a lot of the natural foliage for them as well, which is a big concern to beekeepers.”

Yeah, we know, this is a multi-faceted problem. But what about the pesticides? More on that from the Post-Dispatch:

Published last year, a study by Purdue University found that dead bees that had foraged in and around corn fields contained high levels of neonicotinoid compounds. The study was prompted by massive bee die-offs that happened in the spring, when corn planters were spewing neonicotinoid-containing dust.

“I know, definitively, that there’s a relationship between treated seed and spring die-offs,” said Christian Krupke, the study’s lead author. “It (neonicotinoids) blows out behind the planter and gets in the air, it lands on dandelions. It lands on the bees, even.”

While Krupke says there’s no direct link between neonicotinoids and Colony Collapse Disorder, he said, “anything that’s a stressor to bees is a concern now. We know they’re weaker because of it.”

The industry, however, flatly denies any link between bee health and the neonicotinoids it produces.

“There’s no scientific evidence linking neonics with bee health — period,” said Dave Fischer, director of environmental toxicity and risk assessment at Bayer CropScience.

Perhaps pesticide makers are hoping their happy PR buzz will distract us from the missing buzz of these critical pollinators.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Food

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Jump to original: 

Bee-killing pesticide companies are pretending to save bees

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, organic, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bee-killing pesticide companies are pretending to save bees

European agency declares popular pesticide too dangerous for bees

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 17, 2013

European agency declares popular pesticide too dangerous for bees

By Susie Cagle

Are you sick of hearing about colony collapse? Hey, me too! But I’m guessing the bees are even more fed up at this point.

For the first time, Europe’s food safety agency this week officially labeled the world’s most popular insecticide, imidacloprid, as so dangerous as to be unacceptable for use on crops pollinated by bees, though the body lacks the power to ban the chemical. The report also called into question two other types of neonicotinoid pesticides. All three sound super-evil.

From The Guardian:

[Imidacloprid’s] manufacturer, Bayer, claimed the report, released on Wednesday, did not alter existing risk assessments and warned against “over-interpretation of the precautionary principle”.

The report comes just months after the UK government dismissed a fast-growing body of evidence of harm to bees as insufficient to justify banning the chemicals. …

Scientists at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), together with experts from across Europe, concluded on Wednesday that for imidacloprid “only uses on crops not attractive to honeybees were considered acceptable” because of exposure through nectar and pollen. Such crops include oil seed rape, corn and sunflowers. EFSA was asked to consider the acute and chronic effects on bee larvae, bee behaviour and the colony as a whole, and the risks posed by sub-lethal doses. But it found a widespread lack of information in many areas and had stated previously that current “simplistic” regulations contained “major weaknesses”.

Bayer and other chemical giants published their own report this week, claiming that banning neonicotinoids would cost farmers hundreds of millions. But neonicotinoid manufacturers will still have to give the European Commission a response to the EFSA report by the end of this month, and the Commission could actually possibly maybe ban the pesticides.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture have expressed concern over the chemicals in the past, but pretty much stopped there — at concern. And then approval. And then widespread spraying on just about everything we and the bees eat!

The EFSA isn’t a regulatory board, just an advisory one, so the E.U. doesn’t have to listen to its warnings. But bee health seems to be EFSA’s jam, and it’s not likely to back down. Last summer, the organization put together this video on all the threats to our tiny, stingy, pollinatey pals. It’s as cute as it is horrifying.

The more we learn about exactly what’s killing all the bees, the more the problem seems fixable, at least in theory. If the E.U. really goes to war with big chemical companies over tiny bees, it could be a game-changer. Meanwhile, the U.S. will be over here, still spraying with abandon.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Food

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Read More:  

European agency declares popular pesticide too dangerous for bees

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on European agency declares popular pesticide too dangerous for bees