After an extended and hard-fought battle, the European Commission this week agreed to put in place a temporary ban on a widely-used class of insecticides – the neonicotinoids – because of their link to declining bee populations. This is a clear victory for supporters of the precautionary principle. In the eyes of many people, the fact that lab experiments had shown that exposure to certain levels of this class of compound could harm bees was enough to justify the ban. But the way in which it came about shows that this is not at all a clear-cut issue.
For a start, only 15 of the 27 Member States voted for the ban in an appeal to the European Council. This was not enough for a qualified majority, and the decision was automatically passed back to the Commission. The Commission in turn was obliged to authorise the ban, this being the proposal it had itself put to the Council, based on advice from the European Food Standards Authority (EFSA).
Eight Member States (including the UK) voted against the proposal, with four abstaining. Also, Germany voted for the ban on appeal, having abstained on the previous vote. It was only these votes which tipped the overall balance in favour of a ban. This was a very close-run contest, but the precautionists won the day. For those who lobbied against the ban, the worry will not just be a short term one; the problem is that after two years the momentum is likely still to be in favour of further restrictions. It is harder to lift a ban than simply to continue use of an approved material.
Worries about decline of bee populations have emerged over the last few years, and are encapsulated in the recently-coined term Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Like many things related to human or environmental health, this is an expression used to describe a phenomenon for which no cause can yet be ascribed. In truth, it is not even really clear that it is something new. Bees are as vulnerable to a range of stresses and their populations have historically fluctuated quite considerably. In the USA, records show that bee numbers had fallen at an alarming rate previously, particularly in the 1880s, 1920s and 1960s. There are also records of a similar occurrence in the UK in 1906, spreading initially from the Isle of Wight. The latest falls, which gave rise to the CCD neologism, started in America in 2006, but similar patterns were then noticed in Europe, particularly in Belgium, France, Italy and Spain.
Various possible causes have been put forward: a range of diseases and pests, malnutrition, climate change, GM crops and even mobile phone radiation. In situations like this, though, the thoughts of many people turn to pesticides, which continue to be blamed for a range of environmental and health problems, often with little evidence. Since the great majority of people do not really appreciate the Paracelsian adage that the dose makes the poison, in their view pesticides are best avoided at any level. This is one of the factors which supports the supposed superiority of organic produce.
When there may be multiple causes for an effect, it is easy to blame the culprit which you see as most likely. This is one reason why the regular bugbears of GM crops, climate change and mobile phone radiation have been cited by some environmentalists. Neonicotinoids have been in the frame for a while. Nicotine itself, as well as being addictive to humans, is poisonous to bees and other insects; it is in fact the tobacco plant’s own natural insecticide.
There have been several laboratory studies that have demonstrated that this class of insecticide does indeed harm bees even at rather low doses; hardly a surprising fact. EFSA, in reviewing this information, has come to the conclusion that, on balance, the use of three neonicotinoids should be severely restricted (EFSA identifies risks to bees from neonicotinoids). This, as the Authority itself says in the press release, is a precautionary position, based on an incomplete evaluation of evidence: “And, because the final guidance document for the risk assessment of plant protection products and bees is still under development, there is a high level of uncertainty in the latest evaluations.”
Sir Mark Walport, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, comes to a different conclusion, explained fully in a comment piece originally published online by the Financial Times (Lest we forget). This is not a question of industrial lobbyists trying to suppress a truth made public by activists; rather, it is a genuine scientific debate, with people tending to make come down on one side of the fence or the other depending on their own mindset and prejudices. Precaution is not necessarily the best path, since every action can have a number of unintended consequences (see, for example, the comment by the BBC’s Matt McGrath: Bees on their knees while bed bugs boom).
As well as looking at hazards identified in controlled laboratory experiments, we need to look at evidence available from actual practice. First, the neonicotinoids were first introduced into America during the 1990s, while CCD did not rear its ugly head until 2006. Also, the disease has hit France, despite very strict limitations on the use of this class of insecticide for a decade or more. Meanwhile, in the UK, CCD has never been confirmed, even though neonicotinoids are widely used. There have been many lost hives, but these have generally been ascribed to bad weather, disease or parasites.
One parallel here may be with the infamous Monarch butterfly saga, which started when researchers at Cornell university found butterfly larva fed on pollen from GM maize to suffer higher mortality. Despite the initial furore, it was soon found that Monarch numbers were sensitive to conditions in their Mexican over-wintering grounds, but were not related to the spread of GM maize in the USA.
Hopefully, enough data will be collected over the next two years to determine whether field use of neonicotinoids has in fact been a significant contributory cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. It would be reassuring to see a proper, evidence-based decision being made about the future use of this very useful tool for farmers.
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