AgroPages-NRDC petitions US EPA to cancel neonicotinoid pesticides-Agricultural news

NRDC filed a legal petition recently against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), asking EPA to withdraw its approval of neonicotinoid pesticides (called neonics), given the broad scientific consensus that neonicotinoids pose a serious risk to honeybees, wild bees, and other pollinators.

Specifically, NRDC petition says: “Given mounting scientific evidence that neonicotinoids are toxic to bees and threaten both individual and population survival, the agency should initiate cancellation proceedings for all neonicotinoid pesticide products, beginning with those for which safer alternatives are available. In the meantime … EPA should—at a minimum—initiate interim administrative review to evaluate the serious threat that neonicotinoids pose to bees.”

NRDC also states that EPA should complete this interim review within one year (by 2015), whereas EPA’s own timeline is to have its review done five years from now (by 2019). If, after its review EPA fails to cancel neonicotinoid pesticides on flowering plants that attract bees, then our petition requests that EPA provide a justification for its decision.

An international committee of twenty-nine scientists – the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides - reviewed over 800 peer reviewed papers published in the past five years, including industry-sponsored ones. Its assessment, called the Worldwide Integrated Assessment of the Impact of Systemic Pesticides on Biodiversity and Ecosystems (WIA), concluded that neonicotinoid pesticides are contaminating land, soil, and water, leading to toxic threats to earthworms, snails, butterflies, birds, and bees.

The classic laboratory toxicity studies, which measure short-term (acute) effects at relatively high doses, are insufficient to accurately assess the long-term (chronic) impacts to wildlife from environmentally-relevant doses.