EPA allowed bee-toxic pesticide despite own scientists’ red flags

All of that, plus my favorite crop to fix­ate on: indus­trial corn, which blan­kets 88 mil­lion acres of farm­land nation­wide and pro­duces a bounty of protein-rich pollen on which hon­ey­bees love to feast.

It’s The Agency Who Kicked the Beehive, as writ­ten by Jonathan Franzen!

Hive talk­ing

An inter­nal EPA memo released Wednesday con­firms that the very agency charged with pro­tect­ing the envi­ron­ment is ignor­ing the warn­ings of its own sci­en­tists about cloth­i­an­i­din, a pes­ti­cide from which Bayer racked up €183 mil­lion (about $262 mil­lion) in sales in 2009.

Clothianidin has been widely used on corn, the largest U.S. crop, since 2003. Suppliers sell seeds pre-treated with it. Like other mem­bers of the neon­i­coti­noid fam­ily of pes­ti­cides, cloth­i­an­i­din gets “taken up by a plant’s vas­cu­lar sys­tem and expressed through pollen and nec­tar,” accord­ing to Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA), which leaked the doc­u­ment along with Beyond Pesticides. That effect makes it highly toxic to a crop’s pests—and also harm­ful to pollen-hoarding hon­ey­bees, which have expe­ri­enced mys­te­ri­ous annual mas­sive die-offs (known as “colony col­lapse dis­or­der”) here in the United States at least since 2006.

The colony-collapse phe­nom­e­non is com­plex and still not com­pletely under­stood. While there appears to be no sin­gle cause for the annual die-offs, mount­ing evi­dence points to pes­ti­cides, and specif­i­cally neon­i­coti­noids (derived from nico­tine), as a key fac­tor. And neon­i­coti­noids are a rel­a­tively new fac­tor in ecosys­tems fre­quented by honeybees—introduced in the late 1990s, these sys­temic insec­ti­cides have gained a steadily ris­ing share of the seed-treatment mar­ket. It does not seem unfair to observe that the health of the hon­ey­bee pop­u­la­tion has steadily declined over the same period.

According to PANNA, other crops com­monly treated with cloth­i­an­i­din include canola, soy, sugar beets, sun­flow­ers, and wheat—all among the most widely planted U.S. crops. Bayer is now peti­tion­ing the EPA to reg­is­ter it for use with cot­ton and mus­tard seed.

The doc­u­ment [PDF], leaked to Colorado bee­keeper Tom Theobald, reveals that EPA sci­en­tists have essen­tially rejected the find­ings of a study con­ducted on behalf of Bayer that the agency had used to jus­tify the reg­is­tra­tion of cloth­i­an­i­din. And they reit­er­ated con­cerns that wide­spread use of cloth­i­an­i­din imper­ils the health of the nation’s honeybees.

I asked an EPA press spokesper­son via email if the sci­en­tists’ opin­ion would inspire the agency to remove cloth­i­an­i­din from the mar­ket. The spokesper­son, who asked not to be named but who com­mu­ni­cated on the record on behalf of the agency, replied that cloth­i­an­i­din would retain its reg­is­tra­tion and be avail­able for use in the spring.

Wimpy watch­dog­ging

Before we dig deeper into the leaked memo, it’s impor­tant to under­stand the sorry story of how an insec­ti­cide known to harm hon­ey­bee pop­u­la­tions came to blan­ket a huge swath of U.S. farm­land in the first place. It’s nearly impos­si­ble not to read it as a tale of a key pub­lic watch­dog instead heel­ing to the indus­try it’s sup­posed to regulate.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle on Grist.org.