Source: GENETIC LITERACY PROJECT, 6/21/18


Five years after the European Union imposed a temporary ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, an “experts committee” of the member states has now finally voted to make the ban permanent. This was hardly a surprise. The vote followed shortly after the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published their advisory opinion that neonics “represent a risk to wild bees and honeybees,” a finding that got banner headlines across Europe and the U.S. Any reporter who actually read the report, however, would have discovered that EFSA found nothing of the sort. What they actually found was that it’s very difficult in the real world of science to prove a negative, which is why the most repeated phrase on the inside pages was that a “low risk could not be confirmed.”

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