Brexit means this too: the United Kingdom has decided to grant farmers the use, albeit temporary, of one of the most dangerous pesticides for bees.
While efforts are under way to understand what effects Brexit — that is, the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union (EU) — will have on British environmental policy, significant choices have already been made across the Channel. The Environment Secretary, George Eustice, has approved the use of one of the three neonicotinoid pesticides banned by the EU: thiamethoxam.
This substance, together with clothianidin and imidacloprid, has been banned in EU member states because it is considered dangerous to bees and other pollinating insects, as explained in a report drawn up in 2019 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Fao) and the World Health Organization (Who).
Studies suggest that neonicotinoids can reduce the birth rate of these insects and the number of queen bees, cause brain damage, weaken their immune systems and impair their ability to fly. Furthermore, the use of these products can also prove harmful to organisms that inhabit the soil.
Despite having been among the countries that supported the ban at EU level, the United Kingdom has, years later, chosen to meet the demands of the Unione nazionale degli agricoltori and of British sugar, the only domestic producer of sugar beet, specifically to protect this plant from a virus that causes yellowing of the leaves.
The government has clarified that the use of thiamethoxam will be permitted on a temporary basis, in a "limited and controlled" manner, for a maximum period of 120 days. "It will not be sprayed on flowering plants," a spokesperson for the British environment department specified. "As has happened elsewhere, we have granted an emergency authorisation because there were no alternatives." Indeed, a similar decision had been taken by France in October.
According to the Wildlife trusts, a federation bringing together 46 nature conservation organisations in the United Kingdom, parliamentarians have "bowed" to the interests of farmers, when they should instead have committed to protecting bees, whose population on British territory has fallen by a third in ten years. In Europe, one in ten species of bee or butterfly is at risk of extinction. The main threats come from "the three ps": pesticides, parasites and habitat loss. The extinction rate of insects is eight times faster than that of vertebrates: around 40 per cent of insect species is subject to drastic rates of decline worldwide. And it is worth remembering that both the balance of ecosystems and our nutrition depend on them: three quarters of the crops on which our diet is based are pollinated by bees.
Unfortunately, in a climate of uncertainty both politically and as a result of the pandemic, there is a risk that the protection of the environment and of biodiversity will be pushed into the background. Yet the crisis we are living through has demonstrated once again that preserving habitats must necessarily be counted among the priorities of institutions.
