All the progress you and I have made to keep bees safe from toxic pesticides… what if it just disappeared?
Countries including Belgium, Spain and Romania want to pretend our Europe-wide ban on bee-killing neonicotinoids never happened. Using an "emergency" loophole, they're allowing tonnes of the banned chemicals to be sprayed on crops that could end up on our plates.
Even in the midst of the pandemic, Belgium granted a new re-authorisation for one of the toxic neonics, thinking we'd be too distracted to notice! If we don't act to stop this, our ban will be useless -- and the bees will suffer the consequences.
We've already called on the EU to stop countries from breaking the ban. Now it's time to double down by putting pressure on individual governments to protect the bees -- before it's too late.
It's not small, struggling farmers who want to keep Europe's fields full of banned pesticides -- it's megacorporations like Bayer and Syngenta, who're behind many of the so-called "emergency" requests for neonic exemptions.
They claim that crops like corn and sugar beets can't be grown without neonics -- but Germany, France and Sweden have all rejected applications to re-authorise the bee-killing pesticides. If they can grow crops without killing bees, other countries can too!
Our food system doesn't need toxic pesticides to thrive -- but it does need bees. Will you act now to save them?
Tell Romania, Lithuania, Spain, Belgium, Poland and Finland to stop using neonics.
Unfortunately, pesticide bans aren’t always enough to protect our crucial pollinators. Bayer, Syngenta and co. have millions to spend on court cases, government lobbying, anything to keep churning out litre after litre of their bee-harming chemicals.
But with our combined people power, we’ve got a real chance of stopping them. Over 150,000 of us showed the EU we’d had enough of fake “emergency” exemptions to our bee-saving neonicotinoid ban. Hundreds more SumOfUs members chipped in so that the Bee Defender Alliance, a group of independent scientists and beekeepers, could take on Bayer in court to fight and defeat the pesticide giant’s latest legal challenge to the ban.
We can’t give up until our bees are safe. So please, will you help get all European governments to uphold this important pesticide ban?
Thanks for all that you do,
David and the team at SumOfUs
More information:
EU criticised for 'emergency authorisations' of banned bee-harming pesticide, The Guardian, 15 February 2017
The Playbook for Poisoning the Earth, The Intercept, 18 January 2020