Bird group calls for halt to widely applied insecticide

Chuck Raasch, USA TODAY | USATODAY

The American Bird Conservancy is calling for a ban on using one of the globe's most widely used classes of insecticides in seed treatments and for a suspension of all other uses, pending an independent review of its impact on birds and other wildlife.

The Bird Conservancy, one of the nation's most active bird-conservation groups, released a 97-page report Monday that says that independent studies of the damage to birds and aquatic ecosystems they depend upon for food raise "significant environmental concerns" and that the Environmental Protection Agency has been too lenient in allowing the use of this class of insecticides, called neonicotinoids.

Their possible role in the decline of honeybee populations in the USA and Europe has spurred intense debate among scientists, wildlife advocates and manufacturers, and the EPA is re-evaluating its registration of this class of insecticide.

The EPA will "carefully consider the study results and conclusions cited in this report," and the agency's review "is not limited to impact on bees," said Jim Jones, acting assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.

He said the EPA "has accelerated the comprehensive re-evaluation of these pesticides in the registration review program due to stakeholder concern about the environmental impacts of neonicotinoid pesticides."

Manufacturers say the American Bird Conservancy report depends on suspect science, and a ban would be destructive to global agricultural production. Defenders say that neonicotinoids were created as safer alternatives to the pesticide class they replaced about 20 years ago.

Neonicotinoids have been in use for about two decades. The insecticides are sprayed or used to coat seeds, such as corn, to protect crops and control insects around the globe.

The Bird Conservancy says it's worried that bird populations are diminishing, partly because this class of insecticide lingers longer in plants than the classes it replaced.

Birds that eat seed coated with the pesticide can die after a single kernel, and even smaller amounts can affect reproduction, the report says. It says high concentrations of neonicotinoid have been found in aquatic food chains, from California to the Netherlands, that birds depend upon for food.

"It is clear that these chemicals have the potential to affect entire food chains," said Cynthia Palmer, pesticides program manager for the American Bird Conservancy.

She and Pierre Mineau, a former senior research scientist at Environment Canada, that country's environmental agency, reviewed about 200 independent studies of neonicotinoids in the USA, Canada and Europe, and thousands of pages of EPA documents they obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

They concluded that the EPA has "greatly underestimated this risk, using scientifically unsound, outdated methodology that has more to do with a game of chance than with a rigorous scientific process."

"There is evidence that the neonicotinoids got a very soft ride through registration" from the EPA, the report says.

An industry scientist disagreed, arguing that the EPA constantly monitors the effects and that extensive studies by Bayer and other major producers of the insecticide do not show adverse effects on birds.

"Field studies have shown that birds rarely, if ever, are affected when fed a diet with a high content of treated seed," said Mike Leggett, senior director of environmental policy for CropLife America, the association that represents pesticide makers. "This seed technology continues to be an important tool in modern agriculture that allows farmers to protect their crops with increasing precision."

He said farmers, using GPS and other recent advances, have vastly limited the areas where the insecticide is applied.

Leggett said the EPA "conducted a thorough review of risk to birds and other wildlife during the registration of neonicotinoids and continues to assess the risk of these and all plant protection products on a recurring basis."

Neonicotinoids were first introduced in the 1990s to replace older classes of pesticides that had become ineffective and had raised health concerns. The Bird Conservancy's Palmer said she and Mineau found that EPA scientists raised red flags but neonicotinoids were approved anyway.

"What we are telling EPA is that their own research yields some quite significant results that they should be looking at," Palmer said.

Mineau acknowledged that he and Palmer were calling for drastic action, but what they found in the scientific studies should cause the EPA to be "shaken quite radically" in its oversight.

"A transition away from the world's most widely used insecticides would not be easy and would have to involve a lot of hard work by a range of disciplines in coming up with alternative products and processes," he said. "But if we can send a man to the moon, surely we can invent better pest control technologies."

CropLife America's Leggett said he believes the bird group is trying to piggyback on the bee controversy.

"For the EPA to ... adhere to the recommendations of the Bird Conservancy and call for an all-out ban would be hugely disruptive to agriculture," he said. "There is nothing in this report that meets the standard for EPA to entertain this drastic a step."