pesticides

The European Commission is considering draft regulations to ban the mostly widely used insecticides in fields across Europe in order to protect bees, according to documents obtained by The Guardian via the Pesticide Action Network Europe. A vote is expected this May; if passed the ban could take effect within months.

After three Hawaiian counties lost efforts to regulate GMOs and require pesticide disclosure on the local level, Democratic state Rep. Richard Creagan is proposing a change to a state bill that would require agribusinesses to reveal what kinds of pesticides they are using, where they are using them, and in what quantities.

Hawaiian lawmakers killed a bill that would have required agribusiness companies like Monsanto and Syngenta to notify nearby residents before spraying pesticides, says Civil Beat. “Reporting provisions requiring notifications for each application would be very onerous and difficult to carry out,” testified Warren Mayberry, DuPont Pioneer’s senior manager of government affairs.

The world needs a comprehensive and binding treaty to phase out the use of highly dangerous pesticides and to promote agroecology, which replaces chemicals with biology, as the sustainable method of food production, two UN experts recommended in a report to the UN Human Rights Council. "The assertion promoted by the agrochemical industry that pesticides are necessary to achieve food security is not only inaccurate but dangerously misleading," says the report.

Greenpeace claims that several members on the European Chemical Agency (ECHA), set to decide today whether to grant the controversial pesticide glyphosate another 15-year license to be sold in the EU, have a conflict of interest, says The Independent.

More than 700 of the 4,000 wild bee species in North America and Hawaii are seeing falling numbers due to habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change and monoculture farming, says the Center for Biological Diversity.

Researchers say farmworkers who experience a high pesticide exposure event, such as a spill, are more likely to have molecular changes in their DNA that may lead to certain types of cancer, says Environmental Health News (EHN). The research was drawn from the long-running Agricultural Health Study of 57,000 private and commercial pesticide users in Iowa and North Carolina.

Little research and scant funding is directed toward the ecological impacts of pesticides, says a new report published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. “Fewer than 1 percent of published ecological studies over the past 25 years mentioned synthetic chemicals, according to the researchers, who looked at papers in 20 mainstream ecology journals,” said Ensia.

U.S. district judge William Alsup said he is sympathetic to the plight of bees and beekeepers but he cannot force the EPA to regulate neonicotinoid seed coatings as a pesticide. The environmental group Center for Food Safety, which represented the plaintiffs, said the decision was "a crushing blow" to attempts to control the side effects of the coatings.

In a victory for Monsanto, Syngenta and other seed companies farming in Hawaii, a federal appeals court ruled that counties can’t regulate pesticide use or GMO crops, says Civil Beat. “The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded Friday that Hawaii state pesticide law is comprehensive, and that the Legislature intended it to be 'uniform and exclusive of additional, local rules.'”

The head of Donald Trump’s EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, is not only a climate-change skeptic. He also has a history of discouraging pesticide regulations, writes Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, pointing to Ebell's role as the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

With Syngenta already under investigation for the alleged misuse of pesticides in Hawaii, the EPA is now looking into Monsanto, Terminix, and Wonder Farm [a Hawaiian agricultural operation] for allegedly ignoring pesticide laws in Hawaii, says Civil Beat.

California growers would be barred from applying many agricultural pesticides within a quarter-mile of public schools and day-care centers during school days under a proposed regulation unveiled by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation. It would be the first statewide standard and would take effect in September 2017, says AgNet West.

In the 20 years since GMO crops were approved for cultivation, U.S. farmers have embraced them almost to exclusion of other seeds while Europe has steadily refused to let them into its fields. The New York Times says its "extensive examination" of U.S. and European farming found that genetic engineering "has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides."

With 700 million pounds of pesticide used every year, inventors are trying to create a new generation of pesticide-detectors, cheap enough for the public to afford, says Modern Farmer. One Belgian research team has developed a machine that can “smell” pesticides.

Pesticide manufacturers Syngenta and Bayer appear to have secreted away studies that showed their pesticides did serious harm to honeybees, rather than revealing the results to the public. After Greenpeace obtained the studies from the EPA through the Freedom of Information Act, scientists are calling on the two companies to operate with more transparency, says The Guardian.