Who is winning the PR battle over neonicotinoids?
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Version 0 of 1. When a judge ruled last week that an injunction be lifted on the German chapter of the Friends of the Earth (FoE) so it could criticise the “bee-friendly” claims of a chemical giant’s pesticides, campaigners hailed it as a victory for freedom of speech. “Bayer Group has been shown up as a corporate bully, trying to silence campaigners who are standing up for bees,” heralded a press release from the environmental group. But the case, which focused on two domestic plant sprays whose packaging claimed they were not harmful for bees, is just the latest battle in a public relations war over the environmental credentials of neonicotinoids. While the judge was careful to say that these sprays had passed all German testing regulations, the verdict ensured the debate around the pesticide’s potentially drastic impact on bees and other key pollinators would continue to be very much in the public sphere. So who’s winning the debate and are the claims being made true? Related: Will the UK's pollinator strategy be enough to stop bee decline? The collapse of bee colonies worldwide in 2007 spawned global headlines warning of an ecological Armageddon. Initially, environmental groups and agrichemical firms were united in their concern and support for government action to introduce a national strategy to rescue the UK’s pollinators. FoE and the Soil Association created the high-profile campaigns Bee Cause and Keep Britain Buzzing, and Syngenta and Bayer both launched research initiatives dedicated to the issue (Bayer Bee Care and Operation Pollinator), with well-resourced websites. But after a growing number of scientific studies blamed pesticides – and specifically neonicotinoids – for contributing to the hive collapses, and with the European Commission (EC) introducing a two-year moratorium on three types of the insect nerve agent (imidacloprid, clothianidin and thiamethoxam) in 2013, the battlelines between the two camps were drawn. “It’s more a clash of ideologies than PR,” says Luke Gibbs, head of corporate affairs for northern Europe at Syngenta, the world’s largest agrichemicals company and a leading producer of neonicotinoids. “[Bee decline is] a complicated, multifactorial issue. But it’s become so polarised and politicised that it unfortunately prevents us working together, when it could be very mutually beneficial.” That ideological difference is fundamentally about the risk neonicotinoids pose to the environment, with some environmentalists fearing they could wipe out bees entirely, while agrichemical companies say their responsible use is harmless and stoke fears about food security and the inability to feed a growing world population without them. “Both extremes are complete nonsense,” says bee biologist professor Dave Goulson. “The science is pretty convincing that neonicotinoids are contributing to bees’ decline, but it’s by no means the worst factor. Most scientists agree it’s habitat loss that is the single biggest driver, with disease and pesticides contributing. Obviously, any pesticide is damaging to wildlife; it’s about finding the right balance between productivity and environmental impact.” The scientific evidence around how damaging neonicotinoids are remains the biggest bone of contention for agrichemical companies – both in the press and the courts. Research by the University of Maryland this week found that a neonicotinoid developed by Bayer, imidacloprid, isn’t the main cause of higher death rates in honeybee colonies in the US over the past decade. The three-year study, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, said that imidacloprid may add to stresses on bees such as malnutrition and parasites, but is not the sole cause of honeybee deaths if used in “realistic” levels. “We stand by the integrity of the product and think the science is there to support [it],” says Gibbs. Syngenta has a live legal challenge to the EC ban on neonicotinoids in the European courts, together with separate similar lawsuits brought by Bayer and BASF. “It concerns us that science is being used in a very selective manner and groups, like the International Union for Conservation of Nature, are bringing together scientists on a campaigning basis to create studies that are reported as being definitive but are extremely weak from a scientific view, in our opinion. We’d rather not have taken legal action [against the ban], but there’s a trend in the regulation of agrichemicals – the way the precautionary principle is being used and the evidence is assessed – that we felt we needed to raise.” This overly cautionary reaction is what Syngenta argues prejudices coverage in the media. “Risk makes for a better story,” says Gibbs. “The lean is always towards the negative and potential risk, not the actual results. It’s quite tough as an agrichemical company to get a decent hearing, but our real-world activities working with farmers on Operation Pollinator are more important than PR.” For John Haynes, manager of a 3,000-acre arable farm on the Essex/Herts border, the effects of the neonicotinoids ban are already plain to see. “This is the first season we didn’t use the pesticide and the flea beetle larvae are all over the oil seed rape,” he says. “It’s cost me an additional £25,000 to apply six different insecticides rather than use Cruiser [the neonicotinoids pesticide specially made for oil seed rape and manufactured by Syngenta], but the beetle and aphids are already resistant to theses pyrethroids. It’s old chemistry that kills all other beneficiaries in the soil, rather than the systemic neonicitinoids that target just the beetles, so it’s less environmentally friendly too.” Haynes supports the recent appeal for an emergency exemption from the ban made by the NFU and supported by Syngenta. “The derogation isn’t driven by chemical companies,” he says. “The M11 corridor has been badly hit by flea beetle and we need neonicotinoids to avoid this happening again next year. The greens and beekeepers probably have an argument, but if you want oil seed rape to be grown in this country rather than imported, we need a more intelligent approach to neonicotinoids than a total ban.” As a review of the EC ban approaches later this year, it’s clear that neonicotinoids are seen as a vanguard of the broader political debate around all pesticide use in modern farming. In October 2014 , the Crop Protection Association, whose members include all the major agrichemical manufacturers, launched a new Pesticides in Perspective campaign, paying for a special supplement in the New Statesman that claimed pesticide use had halved between 1990 and 2010 and food prices would rise by 40% without their use. In February, the Bee Coalition – made up of 13 UK environmental organisations, including FoE and the RSPB – countered with a paper that criticised the campaign’s assertions as “misleading” and baseless. Related: Do farmers really need bee-harming insecticides? “More research and development into alternatives to all pesticide use is needed,” says FoE food and farming campaigner, Sandra Bell. “The government’s National Pollinator Strategy [unveiled in November] is really welcome, but there is a big gap around farming methods and pesticide use going unchallenged.” Goulson agrees that current farming practices use too many pesticides and are ultimately unsustainable. “The drive for ever-increasing productivity is good for industry but not the environment, with evidence that it’s causing soil quality to decline and impacting on birds and other wildlife, not just bees,” he says. “There’s actually plenty of food being produced; we need to be less wasteful, not more intensive.” The food hub is funded by The Irish Food Board. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled ‘brought to you by’. Find out more here. 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