Official data released this Thursday (18th) by Unearthed, the Greenpeace news site, show that Germany, France and Belgium registered, from September to December of last year, the export to Brazil of more than 1,500 tons of neonicotinoid insecticides, banned in the European Union, as they are harmful to bees.
The products, depending on the concentration in insects, can impair locomotor activity, reducing flight speed, and also affect the ability of bees to find food sources and to locate themselves, leading to the decline of hives over time.
Scientific studies show that neonicotinoids also affect native bees.
The reduction in the number of bees due to poisoning by chemicals used in agriculture harms production and biodiversity, as they are responsible for pollinating several plant species.
In addition to the European Union, the UN agencies for health, WHO, and for food and agriculture, FAO, state that there is a growing consensus that it is necessary to “severely restrict” the use of neonicotinoids, as they represent “high risk to the environment”.
According to FAO, the number of pollinating insects is declining in several regions of the world, in part because of the use of chemical products in agriculture.
In total, according to the data, eight members of the European bloc and the United Kingdom have issued plans to export 3,800 tonnes of chemical products to 65 countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
With one of the strictest legislations in relation to pesticides, the European Union committed last year to ban the export of chemicals banned in the bloc, by launching its Chemical Products Strategy.
Asked this Thursday morning about the implementation of this barrier and the deadlines set, the Commission had not responded by 3:30 pm (local time, 11:30 am in Brazil).
For Brazil, products were sold with the active principles (imidacloprid, clothianidin and thiamethoxam) recognized as toxic to bees by analysis carried out by Ibama (Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Resources), published in March this year.
The products had been re-evaluated by the environmental agency since 2012, after indications that they could be harmful to ecosystems. The opinion was sent to the Ministry of Agriculture — having been consulted about its referral, the agency had not responded by 11:30 am (Brazil time).
According to data from the last quarter of 2020, only from Belgium was planned to ship 2.2 million liters of the insecticide Engeo Pleno S (based on thiamethoxan), which, according to Greenpeace, would be “sufficient to spray several times the whole Belgian territory”.
The largest volume of these chemicals came out of the country in the period analyzed. To Unearthed, the minister of Climate and Environment, Zakia Khattabi, said that the Belgian government is studying legal ways to end the export of banned chemical products.
In France, the second largest exporter of banned neonicotinoids (after Belgium), a national law banning exports of banned pesticides comes into force early next year.
“It is outrageous that the EU continues to produce and export chemical products that we consider too dangerous for use in the bloc,” said German MEP Anna Cavazzini, vice president of the delegation for relations with Brazil.
Cavazzini says the European Union adopts a “double standard, to the detriment of people and biodiversity in countries like Brazil”: “What is dangerous for European citizens and fauna is very dangerous for the rest of the world.”
In this “double standard”, the European bloc relies on buyer legislation to justify the export of chemicals banned in the EU, but does not consider foreign rules in other environmental measures, such as the proposal to ban imports of soy, meat and other commodities, released on this Wednesday (18).
The text, which is yet to be voted on by the European Parliament and the Council (which brings together the leaders of the 27 EU members), prohibits European companies from importing products linked to deforestation, even if they comply with environmental laws that specify legal or illegal logging ( as is the case in Brazil).
In October, French MEPs who oppose the trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur criticized the use in Brazil of pesticides banned by the bloc — part of them produced in the bloc and exported by its member countries, according to data obtained by Unearthed by through the freedom of information rules.
In total, planned exports to the 65 countries contained 702 tonnes of the active ingredients whose outdoor use was banned by the EU in 2018.
Apart from Brazil, which leads the imported volume, the main export destinations, in terms of active ingredient weight, were Russia, Ukraine, Argentina, Iran, South Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Ghana and Mali.
A study released that year by the European Food Safety Authority concluded that “the majority of neonicotinoid pesticide uses posed a risk to wild and domesticated bees, drones and solitary species.”
According to the expert on these insects Dave Goulson, a professor of biology at the University of Sussex, “there seems to be no use of neonicotinoids in outdoor situations considered to be of low risk for all groups of bees.”
Commenting on the report, he stated that the damage is not just in the spraying, but in the contamination of subsequent crops and wild flowers on the edges of the field (in both cases, considered to be high risk).
.
