EPA Ignores Own Science, Plans to Reapprove Deadly Neonicotinoid Pesticides
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to extend the registration of several neonicotinoid insecticides, despite the agency’s own findings of evidence of serious threats to pollinators, aquatic invertebrates and other wildlife.
Recent coverage by The Guardian of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) plan — to extend the registration of several demonstrably harmful neonicotinoid insecticides — compels Beyond Pesticides to identify, once again, the agency’s failures to enact its core mission.That mission is “to protect human health and the environment,” and to ensure that “national efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information.”
EPA has undertaken a review of the registration of several members of the neonicotinoid (neonic) family of pesticides and, despite the agency’s own findings of evidence of serious threats to pollinators, aquatic invertebrates, and other wildlife, it issued interim decisions on these neonics in January 2020 that disregard the science on the pesticides’ impacts.
EPA appears to be prepared to finalize these registrations late in 2022; this would, barring further action, extend the use of these harmful compounds for 15 years.
Neonics are used widely in the U.S., both on crops to kill sucking insects, and as seed treatments with the same goal for the developing plant.
These insecticides are systemic compounds, meaning that once applied, they travel to all parts of a plant through the vascular system, and are then present in pollen, nectar, and guttation droplets.
Non-target organisms — such as bees, butterflies, birds, bats, and other insects — feed and drink from those sources and are thus readily and indiscriminately poisoned.
The compounds are highly mobile, seeping into groundwater and soils, where they persist, causing additional insect exposure to them, as well as soil and water contamination.
Specific impacts of neonics have been covered extensively by Beyond Pesticides in recent years; some examples include reproductive harm to pollinators, negative effects on aquatic wildlife populations, and neonic lethality for bumblebees.
The specific members of the neonicotinoid family of compounds up for EPA review (and likely re-registration) are imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, clothianidin, dinotefuran and acetamiprid.
This class of chemicals targets acetylcholine (ACh) receptors in insects, and acts as ACh agonists — triggering oxidative stress, reducing energy levels, and causing neurodegeneration, even at low levels of exposure.
These impacts can impair cognition (including learning), behavior, vision, cellular energy supply, and sensory and motor functions, and can be lethal.
This class of pesticides is broadly seen as a significant cause of bee losses (in both managed and wild populations), and broad pollinator decline and die-off.
Meanwhile, as Beyond Pesticides wrote in February 2020 in response to EPA’s January 2020 interim decisions, “With widespread pollinator declines linked to neonicotinoid insecticides since the mid-2000s, a growing understanding of the role these systemic insecticides play in the insect apocalypse, and similar declines in bird populations, the agency, according to advocates, has embraced not protection, but the destruction of the shared environment.
While U.S. regulators continue to embrace chemical-dependency, Canada and the European Union acted decisively to eliminate neonicotinoids.”
In May 2020 comments to EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP), Beyond Pesticides added that in addition to the concerns about neonic impacts on pollinators, insects, aquatic life, and other organisms, “With emerging human health concerns being documented, we reiterate our appeal for the agency to adhere to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act’s (FIFRA) statutory mandate and withdraw the registration of these pesticides that clearly pose unreasonable adverse health and environmental effects.”
FIFRA is the federal statute that governs the registration, distribution, sale, and use of pesticides; it stipulates requirements for the registration of any pesticide.
Among those is the requirement that “using the pesticide according to specifications ‘will not generally cause unreasonable adverse effects on the environment,’” with such effects defined as “any unreasonable risk to man or the environment, taking into account the economic, social, and environmental costs and benefits of the use of any pesticide.”
During the past couple of decades, with increasing industry influence on EPA (most dramatic, perhaps, during the Trump years), the agency’s priorities have increasingly “drifted” from the “unreasonable risk to man [sic] or the environment” portion of that FIFRA requirement, and toward consideration of the “economic costs” portion.
Beyond Pesticides has covered this shift at EPA (and OPP in particular), which emanates from its reluctance to hinder corporate interests; learn more here, here, here, and here.
EPA released draft Biological Evaluations (BEs) for clothianidin, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam in August 2021. (A BE is an EPA analysis of potentially harmful impacts of a registered pesticide on any species federally listed, per the Endangered Species Act, as endangered or threatened, or on their critical habitats.)
That BE found that “each of these chemicals is likely to adversely affect certain listed species or their designated critical habitats.” Beyond Pesticides wrote, of that BE, that “each neonic was found to adversely affect over 1,000 endangered species out of 1,821 listed under the law.
Specifically, the neonics were found to adversely affect non-target endangered species: imidacloprid impacted 1,445 species, clothianidin, 1,225, and thiamethoxam, 1,396.
Harmful effects were not limited to a specific subgroup — dozens of species were affected within all groups, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish, plants, and aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates.”
A reminder that rounds out the inanity of the neonic pesticide picture: there is evidence that neonics do not necessarily achieve the results that manufacturers promise.
Research on soybean production, for example, has shown that neonic-treated soybean seeds provide negligible yield and economic benefit to the producer.
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