Keep the bees

The UK Parliamentary inquiry into pollinators and pesticides reinforces the EU proposal to ban the neonicotinoid pesticides, which have killed billions of bees. MPs have called for their use to be banned on crops by January 2014 and for an immediate ban on gardens, golf courses, parks and garden centres.

The EU ban is supported by the EU Parliament and European Food Safety Authority, as well as the governments of France, 
Holland, Spain, Italy and Poland.

It is supported here by Buglife, Friends of the Bees, Pesticide Action Network, Friends of the Earth, the RSPB, the Scottish Wildlife Trust, the Soil Association and the Women’s Institute. More than 2.5 million people have signed the Avaaz petition.

Tragically, the British Bee Keepers Association, the 
Scottish Beekeepers Association and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust have sided with Bayer and Syngenta, to defend these poisons. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth would award them 
medals for the finest examples of “double-think” since 1984 – “We love our bees, but we must save the pesticides that kill them!”

Members of these charities face a dilemma: do they join 
the fight to ban these deadly 
poisons, or continue to serve the interests of the pesticide companies, until every last honeybee, bumblebee, butterfly and bird is dead, or survives only in a glass cabinet?

These charities have lost all credibility as conservation 
bodies. Their policies suggest they have been co-opted or 
infiltrated by the pesticide 
lobbyists, gutted of their 
principles, and given a nice coat of “greenwash”, as camouflage for Syngenta, Bayer and the 
National Farmers’ Union.

Graham White

Friends of the Bees

Coldstream