Beekeepers & Environmental Groups to EPA: Pesticide Approval is “Irresponsible” & “Damaging”
 Today, commercial beekeepers and environmental organizations filed an urgent legal petition with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to
suspend further use of a pesticide the agency knows poses harm to honey
bees, and adopt safeguards to ensure similar future pesticides aren’t
approved by the agency. The legal petition is supported by over one
million citizen petitions also submitted today that were collected from
people across the country calling out one pesticide in particular –
clothianidin – for its harmful impacts on honey bees.“EPA has an
obligation to protect pollinators from the threat of pesticides,” said
Jeff Anderson of California Minnesota Honey Farms, a co-petitioner. “The
Agency has failed to adequately regulate pesticides harmful to
pollinators despite scientific and on-the-ground evidence presented by
academics and beekeepers.”
Over two dozen beekeepers and beekeeper organizations from across the
country, from California and Minnesota to Kansas and New York, filed
the legal petition with the EPA today. Many of these family-owned
beekeeping operations are migratory, with beekeepers traveling the
country from state-to-state, during different months of the year to
providing pollination services and harvesting honey and wax. And they
are concerned about the continued impacts on bees and their beekeeping
operations, which are already in jeopardy.
“The future of beekeeping faces numerous
threats, including from clothianidin, and we need to take steps to
protect pollinators and the livelihood of beekeepers,” said Steve Ellis
of Old Mill Honey Co and a co-petitioner.
Nine years ago, scientists within the EPA required a field study
examining the potential harms of clothianidin to non-target insects –
specifically honey bees – because they had reason to believe the
pesticide may harm pollinators. In the years since EPA first required
this study, a substantial body of scientific evidence has confirmed that
the use of clothianidin, a persistent chemical, presents substantial
risks to honey bees and other insects that are in or near recently sown
fields.
“EPA ignored its own requirements and failed to study the impacts of
clothianidin on honey bees,” said Peter Jenkins, an attorney for the
Center for Food Safety and co-petitioner. “The body of evidence against
the chemical continues to grow, yet the agency has refused to take
action.”
The legal petition points to the fact that EPA failed to follow its
own regulations. EPA granted a conditional, or temporary, registration
to clothianidin in 2003 without a required field study establishing that
the pesticide would have no “unreasonable adverse effects” on
pollinators. Granting conditional registration was contingent upon the
subsequent submission of an acceptable field study, but this requirement
has not been met. EPA continues to allow the use of clothianidin nine
years after acknowledging that it had an insufficient legal basis for
allowing its use to begin with. Additionally, the product labels on
pesticides containing clothianidin are inadequate to prevent excessive
damage to non-target organisms, which is a second violation of the
requirements for using a pesticide and further warrants removing all
such mislabeled pesticides from use.
Over 1.25 million people, including many hobbyist beekeepers,
submitted comments in partnership with the organizations Avaaz,
Change.org, Credo, Pesticide Action Network, Beyond Pesticides and Neals
Yard Remedies/Care2.com, calling on EPA to take action on clothianidin.
“EPA should move swiftly to close the loophole and revoke the
conditional registration of clothianidin,” said Heather Pilatic,
co-director of Pesticide Action Network and a co-petitioner. “Bees and
beekeepers can’t afford to wait another nine years for inaction.”
Petitioners point to the agency’s demonstrated delay in analyzing
potentially harmful products and then taking them off the market. EPA is
concurrently conducting a review of clothianidin’s registration, which
it projects completing in 2018.
Beekeepers estimate the real value of their operations at $50
billion, based on retail value of food and crop grown from seed that
relies upon bee pollination. Bees in particular are responsible for
pollinating many high-value crops, including pumpkins, cherries,
cranberries, almonds, apples, watermelons, and blueberries. So any
decline in bee populations, health and productivity can have especially
large impacts on agriculture, the food system and rural economies. Honey
bees are the most economically important pollinators in the world,
according to a recent United Nations report on the global decline of
pollinator populations.
Beekeepers have survived the economic recession only to find their
operations are still threatened. Recent, catastrophic declines in honey
bee populations, termed “Colony Collapse Disorder,” have been linked to
a wide variety of factors, including parasites, habitat loss and
pesticides like clothianidin.
“Independent research links pollinator declines, especially honey
bees, to a wide range of problems with industrial agriculture,
especially pesticides,” said John Kepner, program director at Beyond
Pesticides and a co-petitioner.
Neonicotinoids, a class of systemic pesticides, is taken up a plant
and expressed through the plants through which bees then forage and
pollinate. Recent research in the journal PLoS ONE underscores the
threat of these pesticides through a previously undocumented exposure
route – planter exhaust – the talc and air mix expelled into the
environment as automated planters place neonicotinoid-treated seeds into
the ground during spring planting.
As a result of the petition, EPA may choose to suspend the use of
clothianidin, or open a public comment process to evaluate the concerns
voiced by beekeepers and environmental organizations.
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