To help bees and farmers, EU should roll back ‘fear-based’ ban on neonicotinoid pesticides

David Zaruk | February 14, 2017


[Editor’s note: The following is a letter by David Zaruk, Belgian-based environmental-health journalist specializing in science and public policy, to Vytenis Andriukaitis, EU commissioner in charge of Health and Food Safety.]

I understand that you belong to a Commission whose chief strategy seems to be expedience (the art of making issues go away). That is not leadership and in the case of the previous Commission’s 
decision to ban three essential and benign insecticides (known as neonicotinoids or neonics), this problem will not go away.

You have clear grounds to [retract the 2013 draft Bee Guidance Document] It was never approved by the European Council (for good reason); [the European Food Safety Authority] has learnt that their expert advisory working group had conflicts of interest which they had hidden from the authority; and the previous DG Sanco had several directors that had been found to be too close to anti-pesticide activist campaigners........To Read More.....