European Commission: Scientists find neonicotinoids don’t harm bees, restrictions hurt farmers—but support permanent ban

Henry Miller | May 16, 2017 | Genetic Literacy Project

Every time I think the European Union’s regulatory bureaucrats have bottomed out on substance and integrity, they find a way to sink even lower.

In February, I wrote about how the European Union has rigged the evaluation of whether state-of-the-art neonicotinoid pesticides (“neonics”) are “bee-safe” by using a “Bee Guidance Review Document” whose test conditions were made deliberately impossible to satisfy. (For those of you just tuning in, neonics, introduced in the 1990’s, are currently the most widely used class of pesticides. Mainly applied as seed coatings to crops, they are taken up into the plant and selectively control only the pests that actually damage or destroy crops while minimizing exposure to humans, animals and beneficial insects—including bees.)

Since then, however, the stakes in the EU crop protection drama have only increased. The pressure from activists has intensified–as have the EU’s manipulative and dishonest regulatory machinations. (How appropriate that Machiavelli was from an EU country.)........Then, in a striking bit of Orwellian newspeak, EU health and food safety Commissioner Andriukaitis claimed that the 2013 ban was “at no time based on a direct link on bee mortality.” Rather, he explained, the ban was instituted simply because the “approval criteria were no longer satisfied”–criteria derived from the rigged, unapproved “Bee Guidance Document” mentioned above. This is the sort of bureaucratic doubletalk that has caused EU regulators to be so despised............To Read More....

My Take - It might be interesting to compare the despicable actions of EU bureaucrats and the EPA.  In 2005 the American Council on Science and Health petitioned the EPA under the Information Quality Act, which required agencies to base their regulations on the best information available, to stop declaring products carcinogenic based on rodent testing alone as that was not the best information available for that purpose. 

Months later - after giving themselves numerous extentions - the EPA responded saying these declaration didn't fall under the auspices of the IQA because they weren't based on science but EPA policy.  So the question everyone should be asking is this - if their policies aren't based on science - what's are they based on.

The EU is going to collapse and the EPA needs to be dismantled.