Washington — The Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is considering “urgently” approval of a neonicotinoid pesticide that kills bees for use on more than 57,000 acres of fruit trees, including apples, in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. , Peaches and nectarines.
If approved, this will be the 10th consecutive year that Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania have granted dinotefuran emergency exemptions to target brown-grafted bugs on bees and stone fruit trees, which is very attractive to bees. The states are seeking retrospective approvals for possible spraying between May 15 and October 15.
In the past nine years, Delaware, New Jersey, North Carolina and West Virginia have received similar approvals, but it is unknown whether they have also sought approval for 2020.
“The real emergency here is that EPA usually uses backdoor procedures to approve pesticides that are highly toxic to bees,” said Nathan Downley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biodiversity. “Last year alone, the EPA used this exemption procedure to avoid normal safety reviews and approved the use of several neonicotinoids that kill bees in nearly 400,000 acres of crops. Abuse exemption from the process. The program must stop.”
In addition to dinotefuran emergency approvals for apple, peach, and nectarine trees, Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania have also received emergency approvals for the past nine years to use bifenthrin (a poisonous pyrethroid) on the same tree. Ester insecticides) fight the same pests.
“Ten years later, it is safe to say that the same pest on the same tree is no longer an emergency,” Tangli said. “Although the EPA claims to want to protect pollinators, the fact is that the agency is actively accelerating its pollination activities.”
EPA routinely allows emergency exemptions for predictable chronic diseases that occur over many years. The EPA’s Office of the Inspector General issued a report in 2019 that found that the agency’s routine approval of “emergency” approvals for millions of acres of pesticides did not effectively measure risks to human health or the environment.
The center has filed a legal petition calling on the EPA to limit the emergency exemption to two years to prohibit certain more serious abuses of the process.
As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is reapproving multiple neonicotinoids for non-emergency use on some of the country’s most widely grown crops, it has urgently approved neonicotinoid difurans. The proposed decision of the EPA Office of Pesticides is in stark contrast to the science-based decisions of Europe and Canada to ban or severely restrict outdoor use of nicotine.
The author of a major scientific review on the catastrophic death of insects said that “significantly reducing the use of pesticides” is the key to preventing as many as 41% of insects from becoming extinct in the next few decades.
The Center for Biodiversity is a national non-profit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to protecting endangered species and the wild environment.