Tom's Corner

HOUSE OF COMMONS
ORAL EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE THE
ENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT COMMITTEE
INSECTS AND INSECTICIDES
WEDNESDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2012

The full, uncorrected transcript can be accessed here.

Excerpt:

EXAMINATION OF WITNESSES

Witnesses: Dr Mike Bushell, Principal Scientific Adviser, Syngenta, Dr Fraser Lewis, Division Head, Environmental Safety, Syngenta, and Dr Julian Little, Government Affairs, Bayer CropScience, gave evidence.

Q154 Chair: I would like to welcome each of you to our session this afternoon, an inquiry that is important to this Select Committee and one that I think is of great interest to many people. For your information, we are expecting votes at 4 pm and we have three separate sessions, so we have a number of detailed questions that we wish to ask of you, if we may.

I would like to start off with a question particularly for Dr Lewis and Dr Bushell. I am referring to today’s Farmers Weekly and the quote, “Based on previous statements, we believe this committee”-the Environmental Audit Committee-“is in danger of pinpointing the bee colony decline on a single pesticide when there are other important factors at play.” On what evidence did you feel compelled to make that statement?

Dr Bushell: That statement was made by one of our Basel corporate affairs people.

Q155 Chair: Do you have the evidence for it?

Dr Bushell: That we made the statement or that you are focusing only on insecticides?

Chair: I wondered what evidence you have to cause Syngenta to make that statement.

Dr Bushell: The issue about bee health is multifactorial, as I am sure you know, and focusing only on a single one is unlikely to get a good result for bee health.

Chair: Thank you very much indeed. We must move on to detailed questions.

…

This is evidence submitted to the British House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee on the systemic pesticides. It is encyclopedic and will take some time to wade through, but the Brits are several steps ahead of us in ferreting out the evidence and addressing the failures in risk assessment. It takes time to read and absorb what is being presented here, but there is some very important information and it is worth the time if you hope to come to any understanding of what is going on.

Start wih Rosemary Mason’s Insects and Insecticides but don’t stop there. She covers just about all of the controversy. Of special interest is her critique of the Cresswell Paper and the misuse of Hill’s Criteria in an attempt to dismiss the role of systemics in bee losses. This is particularly pertinent to us since Dennis vanEnglesdorp was one of the authors of this paper.

This isn’t easy, but some of us must try to understand or we are done for. These mega corporations have legions of paid employees working against us. While the focus is the UK, Rosemary has much to say about the conduct of the United States EPA.

Household pesticides may play a role in declining bee populations says an article published by the University of Minnesota.

“Research shows current regulation is woefully inadequate in protecting the creatures that pollinate much of our food,” according to the Guardian. Excerpt below. Many of the comments are good too.

The new paper, published in Nature, shows that bumblebees foraging naturally and exposed to realistic doses of pesticides suffer in two key ways. First they are about twice as likely to die: two-thirds of the bees are lost when exposed to two pesticides compared to only a third when not exposed. Second, the exposed bees are half as successful in gathering food.

June Stoyer and I interviewed Australian commercial beekeeper Jeffrey Gibbs and that interview aired today. This is an important interview, the supporters of systemic pesticides have cited Australia as an example of a continent with no problems, but Mr. Gibbs presents a quite different view. One key difference is that varroa mites, used repeatedly as an excuse for the U.S. bee losses, are not present in Australia.

If you have not already done so, you should also listen to the interview with Graham White of Scotland done last week, speaking on the problems in Europe and the UK.