Tag: neonics

Neonicotinoid seed treatment will not be used on 2021 beet crop

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An emergency authorisation for the use of neonicotinoid seed treatment Cruiser SB on this year’s sugar beet crop will now not be used, after analysis of aphid populations by scientists. Three neonicotinoids (or neonics as they’re often known) were banned in the UK for outdoor use after their impacts on bees and other pollinators could no longer be denied by the agricultural industry. Cruiser SB, made by Syngenta, contains the banned neonic Thiamethoxam, a potent toxin that a 2017 report in the journal Scientific Reports said altered “honey bee activity, motor functions, and movement to light” and which was reported almost a decade ago to have “high toxicity to birds if directly consumed”.

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Petition | Time to ban neonicotinoids for good

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Neonicotinoids are some of the most poisonous chemicals ever produced – and we used to spray vast quantities of them on our soils to kill ‘crop pests’. They are non-selective, though, killing every insect that comes into contact with them. By weight they are 10,000 times more toxic than DDT. No-one knows just what the ‘cocktail’ effect of using numerous ‘pesticides’ (insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides) at the same time might mean for animals and plants, and in 2018 the EU banned the three main neonicotinoids (clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam) for all outdoor uses. Insect populations are crashing across the UK. Disappearing insects are having enormous negative impacts on insectivorous migrant birds like Cuckoos and Spotted Flycatchers – both once common, both are now Red-listed. The loss of pollinators is threatening food supplies – across the globe according to the United Nations in 2016. All living things are inter-connected. Surely we’d never allow blunt poisons that slash at the heart of those connections back into our countryside?

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