Last week, there was welcome news for bumblebees and other wildlife as the UK Government rejected an application to use a banned, bee-harming pesticide on sugar beet crops in England this year.
This follows four successive years in which the previous government relaxed the rules at the request of the National Farmers Union and British Sugar. The previous decisions were made despite the government’s Expert Committee on Pesticides and the Health and Safety Executive advising against them, given the risks posed to bees and other wildlife. We set out what that meant for bumblebees in this statement last year.
Thousands of people campaigned about these decisions each year, signing petitions and writing to their MPs to make it known that using pesticides known to harm wildlife is not worth the risk. We’ve seen annual debates at Westminster in which MP’s, including Ruderal bumblebee Species champion, Daniel Zeichner (now Minister for Food Security and Agriculture), stood up to argue against using banned neonicotinoids. The Trust is hugely grateful to everyone who made their voice heard for nature on this issue.
It is encouraging to see this cycle of authorising annual “emergency” applications finally come to an end. We particularly welcome the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ renewed commitment to helping farmers tackle pests sustainably and hope that the focus in the sugar industry will now be on supporting their growers to implement sustainable alternatives to using neonicotinoids. We now call on the UK Government to publish the long-overdue UK National Action Plan for the Sustainable Use of Pesticides. The action plan, which was meant to be published in 2018, could be used to set meaningful targets to reduce pesticide use across UK agriculture and set a path to end pesticide use in urban areas.
For more information on how pesticides impact bumblebees and what needs to change, please read our evidence-based position statement.