EU Votes To Ban Bee-Harming Pesticides (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The European Union will ban the world's most widely used insecticides from all fields due to the serious danger they pose to bees. The ban on neonicotinoids, approved by member nations on Friday, is expected to come into force by the end of 2018 and will mean they can only be used in closed greenhouses.

Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed, in part, on the widespread use of pesticides. The EU banned the use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops that attract bees, such as oil seed rape, in 2013. fBut in February, a major report from the European Union's scientific risk assessors (Efsa) concluded that the high risk to both honeybees and wild bees resulted from any outdoor use, because the pesticides contaminate soil and water. This leads to the pesticides appearing in wildflowers or succeeding crops. A recent study of honey samples revealed global contamination by neonicotinoids. The ban on the three main neonicotinoids has widespread public support, with almost 5 million people signing a petition from campaign group Avaaz.

Comments

Re: Fipronil

[Dutch Gun]

So do you not believe that this is the cause of colony collapse or do you not think that a huge decline in pollinators is a problem?

It seems like we'll soon be getting a reasonably definitive answer on that first question. If colonies rebound after the ban, then that's a pretty good indicator of causality. Likewise, if no rebound occurs over a period of time, such that persistent contamination is ruled out, then that also is an indicator that there may be something else at play.

Re: Fipronil

[PopeRatzo]

There is a good reason that the "cradle of civilization" was in an arid semi-desert region: blight and pests are of little problem only in those climates, and in those areas nearly all the modern crops came to be. What can be grown in Iraq without pesticides cannot be grown in most of France without pesticides.

That's horseshit. California feeds most of the country to one extent or another, and we've got the most stringent pesticide reduction program in the US.

We can have crops without pesticides. We can't have crops without bees.