The pesticide lobby funded an “open letter to Ontarians” published a couple times this week as a full-page ad in all the major newspapers, including this one.
It was written on behalf of 28,000 farm families who plant their neonicotinoid-coated seeds in over half of the province’s productive farmland.
Neonicotinoids (NNIs) are the most widely used insecticides in the world. In theory, they are the perfect pesticide, coating the seeds of a crop so the growing plant is seeped in their poison, killing any nibbling critter. This means no sloppy spraying, no residue, no toxic runoff into nearby streams.
In practice, scientists warn NNIs are much less precise than advertised. They are persistent and water-soluble, so they do wash into streams. And they appear to kill more than nibbling pests. They appear to kill pollinators, namely honeybees.
As a result, the Ontario government is preparing legislation to severely restrict NNIs on two crops: corn and soybeans. Today, virtually all corn grown in Ontario and 60 per cent of soybeans sprout from NNI-treated seeds. By 2017, the Ontario government wants that to be cut by 80 per cent.
Europe is in the middle of a two-year ban on neonicotinoids. Ontario’s restrictions, if implemented, would be the first of their kind in North America.
You can see why the pesticide lobby is worried. They sense winds of change that will blow away a lot of their profits.
(The global industry made $2.6 billion U.S. in neonicotinoid sales in 2011, according to the Ontario government’s pollinator health report. In Canada, pesticide manufacturers are represented by CropLife Canada, a lobby group. CropLife’s media relations officer confirmed to me that the organization funded the open letter.)
In a brilliant marketing move, the farmers and pesticide lobby have named their anti-regulation campaign Bees Matter.
I spent a couple days digging into the letter’s “facts.” Most are so delicately cherry-picked they seem purposefully misleading. Others, I’d say, are flat-out wrong.
The truth is bees are dying at an alarming rate in Ontario. Last winter, commercial beekeepers lost 58 per cent of their hives. That was the apex of a worrying 12-year trend, during which a third of hives died off on average. Apiarists consider a 15-per-cent loss over winter the norm.
(It is true, as the letter claims, that reported deaths were down during last year’s spring planting. What it failed to mention: by the end of the year, reports of bee deaths were high again.)
The federal government’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency, which registers commercial pesticides, was worried enough about the bee deaths to conduct some field studies in 2012 and 2013. It discovered neonicotinoid residue on 70 to 75 per cent of dead bees.
It deemed the insecticide use “unsustainable” and published new requirements on how neonicotinoid-coated seeds are planted, to reduce dust. The agency’s working theory is that the dust is killing the foraging bees. But that’s not certain. It wants to examine the issue more.
The Ontario government is choosing the opposite approach. It’s called the precautionary principle. Sure, Queen’s Park isn’t 100-per-cent certain that neonicotinoids are behind the bee die-off. There are lots of outstanding questions, such as why treated corn and soybean seeds seem to be toxic to bees, while NNI-coated canola seeds are not. (This is why there are few reports of honeybee deaths in Western Canada, the land of canola but little corn or soybeans.)
But, the government knows enough about neonicotinoids to treat them like chemotherapy — to be used sparingly, in critical situations.
A group of 29 scientists formed the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides to examine neonicotinoids. They reviewed 800 scientific papers on the pervasive insecticide. Their conclusion, released last summer: the chemicals are causing “significant damage” to not just pollinators like honeybees but also a wide range of species, including worms, snails and possibly birds. The threat, they said, was akin to that of DDT, the cancer-causing insecticide that was finally phased out in Canada during the 1970s, after a decade of scientific alarms.
The scientists called for an “urgent” reduction in its use.
I did approach both CropLife and Grain Farmers of Ontario about my concerns over the letter. The CropLife spokesperson referred me to the GFO spokesperson who, after two days of phone calls and emails, said she couldn’t find anyone to talk to me. She instead emailed a list of stock responses to “frequently asked questions.”
The pesticide lobby, in its letter, asks Ontarians to judge NNIs from “sound science and facts.”
I will take my facts from 800 scientific papers, thank you very much, and not the chemical salespeople.
Bees do matter.
Catherine Porter can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca .
