Bee-Killing Pesticide Given Backdoor Approval for 10th Year

This marks the 10th year that the EPA has granted a so-called “emergency” exemption of clothianidin for use on bee-attractive citrus trees in Florida to target the Asian citrus psyllid, the vector for citrus greening disease.

There are currently 16 different insecticides approved to combat this insect in Florida, including three other neonics: imidacloprid, thiamethoxam and sulfoxaflor, according to the University of Florida.

Imperiled pollinators that will likely be harmed by this approval include the American bumblebee, the southern plains bumblebee and the leafcutter bee.

The EPA has routinely circumvented the normal pesticide-approval process by allowing emergency exemptions for predictable and chronic situations that occur over many consecutive years. Emergency exemptions allow the use of pesticides that are either not approved or are approved for some uses but prohibited for certain other uses.

In 2019 the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General released a report finding that the agency’s practice of routinely granting emergency approval for pesticides across millions of acres does not effectively measure risks to human health or the environment.

The EPA’s widespread abuse of this process was chronicled in the Center’s report, Poisonous Process: How the EPA’s Chronic Misuse of ‘Emergency’ Pesticide Exemptions Increases Risks to Wildlife.

The Center followed that report with a legal petition calling for the EPA to limit emergency exemptions to two years as a way to prohibit some of the more egregious abuses of the process. Nearly four years later the EPA has not substantively responded to the petition or taken any steps to rein in the abuse of the emergency exemptions.

This approval of emergency use of the neonicotinoid clothianidin comes as the EPA is in the process of reapproving multiple neonicotinoids for nonemergency use on some of the most widely grown crops in the country. The EPA pesticide office’s proposed decision stands in sharp contrast with the science-based decisions in Europe and Canada to ban or highly restrict neonics for outdoor use.

The authors of a major scientific review of the catastrophic decline of insects have said that a “serious reduction in pesticide usage” is key to preventing the extinction of up to 41% of the world’s insects in the next few decades.