Five years after the European Union imposed a temporary ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, an โexperts committeeโ of the member states has now finally voted to make the ban permanent. This was hardly a surprise. The vote followed shortly after the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published their advisory opinion that neonics โrepresent a risk to wild bees and honeybees,โ a finding that got banner headlines across Europe and the U.S.
Any reporter who actually read the report, however, would have discovered that EFSA found nothing of the sort. What they actually found was that itโs very difficult in the real world of science to prove a negative, which is why the most repeated phrase on the inside pages was that a โlow risk could not be confirmed.โ
The distance between saying something โrepresents a riskโ and the peculiar assertion that a โlow risk could not be confirmedโ is quite wide, of course. In criminal law, itโs the difference between how we do things in democracies, where the government is required to prove your guilt, and Soviet-style justice where you have to prove your innocence.
And like Soviet prosecutors intent on railroading a troublesome dissident, nothing was going to stop the EU regulatorsโ single-minded prosecution of a ban. Not a mere semantic distinction like this. Not the mass of scientific evidence that hasย convinced regulatorsย in the U.S., Canada and Australia that bees can forage safely on neonic treated crops. Not the fact that the original โbee-pocalypseโ crisis — the reason neonics were banned in the first place —ย turned out to be complete fiction. (Indeed, honeybee populations are rising in Europe and every other habitable continent in the world, and have been since neonics came on the market in the mid-1990s โ facts that areย ย easily discoverable with a Google search on the FAOโs website:ย http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QA). Not the fact that the Commissionโs ownย reportย identified the Varroa mite and the numerous diseases it vectors into the hive as the primary cause of bee health problems. Not the fact that the same report found only three of 100 beekeepers and only one of the bee laboratories surveyed pointed to pesticides as a major issue.
EFSAโs evidence-be-damned approach was most apparent, however, in their insistence on issuing regulatory โguidanceโ that ensured they would never be able to โconfirmโ a low risk to bees, even though the great weight of scientific evidence demonstrates just that.
Usually, when people cheat, they try to hide it. As Iโve discussed in previous columns, however, EFSAโs โcheat sheetโ โ the document that lays out just how they rigged the process — is available for all to see on the EUโs website,ย here. Known as theย Bee Guidance Document, or BGD for short, it created the regulatory framework that EFSA used to make its assessments. Investigative reporter David Zaruk has detailed how the working group that wrote the BGD wasย hijacked by anti-pesticide activistsย in 2011, and that once the document was accepted by EFSA, โthe precautionary conclusion was baked into the process.โ
Even EU member countries actively militating for a ban havenโt been able to bring themselves to vote for it. As they all know, if BGD criteria were applied to other risk assessments, no insecticide currently used in Europe โ including organic pesticides such asย Neem oilย — could ever be approved.ย ย (Organic farmers use numerous pesticides that theย Xerces Society considers โHighly Toxicโย to bees, including pyrethrins, rotenone, sabadilla, spinosad, copper sulfate, as well as what is called โinsecticidal soapโ and โhorticultural oil.โ) To this day, as a matter of law, the BGD remains unapproved, not that that seems to have mattered to the regulators.
The primary difficulty for EFSA was that it needed some sort of scientific rationale to ban neonics, and the best scientific evidence we have, which comes from large-scale field studies, overwhelmingly demonstrates that neonics have no adverse effects on hive health. Known as the โgold standardโ of bee research, these field studies are difficult and expensive to conduct, but they are also the only valid measure of how bees are affected by neonics in the real world.
Environmental activists and most academic scientists, on the other hand, much prefer laboratory and โsemi-fieldโ studies in which individual bees are force fed large quantities of neonics and, not surprisingly, become confused or suffer some other adverse effect. Such studies are almost guaranteed headlines, of course, and theyโre relatively cheap to produce, which is why activist scientists have been churning them out on a virtual assembly-line over the last several years (for example,ย hereย andย here).
EFSA needed to provide the veneer of a scientific rationale for the ban โ i.e. to find some excuse to ignore the field studies and base their finding on inapposite lab experiments instead. That veneer is just what the BGD provides. How? Simply by creating requirements for field studies that areย literally impossibleย to meet, allowing EFSA to dismiss or heavily discount the results of every single field study ever conducted.
To give just two examples. . .ย ย The BGD requires that field studies demonstrate that the mortality rate of test bees in neonic treated fields is no larger than seven percent. Given that bee populations within any given hive normally fluctuate as much as 21 percent, it is statistically nearly impossible to demonstrate such a small variation.
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Equally impossible is the BGDโs requirement for the size of field studies. To meet all of the BGDโs criteria, a single study would need a test area ofย 448 square kilometersย (173 square miles). Thatโs more thanย seven times the size of Manhattan Island, which is just underย 23 squareย miles, andย over four times the size of Paris. Given that the test and control fields would need to be far removed from any other bee-attractive crops, flower, hedgerow or flowering tree, such a study could probably not be done in the European landscape.
In the end, this was the central reason why EFSAโs studiesย didnโtย really conclude that neonics pose a risk to bees, as they said in their press release. If science reporters had actually bothered to read the report, which clearly almost none did, they would have found that EFSAโs scientists said over and over that a โlow riskโ to bees โcould not be confirmed.โ Of course a โlow riskโ couldnโt be confirmed โ all the field studies that demonstrated there was actuallyย zero riskย were arbitrarily discounted or disqualified by the BGD.
Donโt expect to hear much about any of this in the mainstream press. Even reporters for major journals seem not to bother to read the scientific papers they are reporting on; they rely heavily on the press releases and regurgitate their ideological conclusions. Not one of them pointed out how odd it was that the EUย leakedย its plans to expand the neonic ban to all crops aย full yearย before EFSA delivered its assessment on whetherย anyย ban was scientifically justified, or the scientific anomaly of banning neonics on crops such as sugar beets that donโt flower or produce pollen, which means bees will never come in contact with them.
As I and others have reported, however, the Bee Guidance Document is only one of the many frauds on the road to this unnecessary and destructive ban.
In addition to theย fictional โbee-pocalypse,โ which the EC endlessly promoted at the time, and the Commissionโs own report from 2010 demonstrating that neonics were of almostย no concernย to either beekeepers or bee scientists, the Commission and EFSA have a consistent record of bias and manipulation on this issue. Some of the most egregious include:
- Theย false and inflammatoryย press release on EFSAโs review of neonics that the agencyโs French Director General, Catherine Geslain-Lanรฉelle, issued at the time of the ban, after which she was almost immediately rewarded with a plum job in the French government.
- The โBee-Gateโ scandal, in which the EU-subsidized International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) was revealed to be conspiring to fabricate studies that would support its โcampaignโ to have neonics banned.
- The European Commissionโs attempt to suppress aย report by their own Joint Research Center, which demonstrated that the ban had been a failure and was actually bad for bees.
This scientific and regulatory policy chicanery in the EU will have a wide ripple effect. It will fuel the activists in the environmental community in Europe and indeed around the world, who now clearly feel on the ascendant, convincing them what they always suspected: that the scientific assessments that go into government regulation are easily manipulated by whoever has the most political muscle.
The worst aspect of this abandonment of principle for political expediency, however, is that it undermines the legitimacy of the scientific enterprise itself, at least as its practiced in modern Europe. This goes for the broader scientific community, as well as regulatory scientists at EFSA specifically implicated in this process. The neonic issue has been played out in public for a full five years. The facts are available to any scientist, editor or reporter at a scientific journal, or any policy maker who cares to be informed. Yet almost all have gone along with the charade.
We know from the European Commissionโs own study, noted above, that bees are one of the major victims of this ban. They will survive, to be sure. It is the EUโs policymaking process that is ailing, and the integrity of Europeโs regulatory scientists that is in danger of collapse or extinction.
Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford Universityโsย Hoover Institutionย and a former trustee of the American Council on Science and Health. He was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the FDA. Follow him on Twitterย @henryimillerย
This article was originally published at Science 2.0 as “The Neonic Ban: A Scientific Fraud Becomes Enshrined In EU Regulatory Law” and has been republished here with permission.ย
