Lawsuit Demands EPA Call a Pesticide a Pesticide

Every year, American farmers spray some 3.5 million pounds of neonicotinoid insecticides over 127 million acres of farmland. That’s according to official Environmental Protection Agency estimates, at least. But the bee-killing chemicals are present in crops on more than twice as many acres because, thanks to an EPA loophole a large swath of land planted with neonic-treated corn, soy, and other crops doesn't count as being treated with pesticides.

The difference comes in the application, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by a coalition of beekeepers, farmers, and environmental and wildlife conservation groups: The EPA only regulates neonics as a pesticide when they are sprayed on fields. Meanwhile, farmers who use seeds pretreated with neonics—allowing the insecticide to be taken up in every part of the plant, from leaf to pollen—aren’t considered to be using a pesticide, and they aren’t regulated as such. The federal lawsuit filed seeks to change that.

"EPA has created an exemption that is so big you could drive a Mack truck through it and allows this vast suite of environmental harms and bee kills and other sort of damage to occur without any oversight," Peter Jenkins, an attorney with the anti-GMO group Center for Food Safety, which is party to the suit, told Minnesota Public Radio on Wednesday.

Jeff Anderson, a Minnesota beekeeper who is the lead plaintiff, says that dust from fields planted with treated seeds has drifted onto his hives, as might happen when a field is sprayed with pesticides, killing bees.

Many have singled out neonics as the culprit in the troublingly high rates of bee die-offs observed in managed hives in recent years, while the science suggests that a host of pests, chemicals, and environmental influences are behind the losses. But even if bee death is more complicated than one chemical, the EPA itself is now saying that neonics harm bees. However, the agency's first assessment of the insecticides, released Wednesday, says the chemicals are only a risk to bees when applied to cotton and citrus, not corn and vegetable crops. The EPA has not commented on the new lawsuit.

Other research, including studies conducted by the EPA, suggest that using pretreated seeds simply isn’t worth it. A 2014 EPA report concluded that seed treatment “provide[s] negligible overall benefits to soybean production in most situations.” A review of 19 papers on neonic treatments conducted by the Center for Food Safety found that 11 studies concluded that the insecticides had “inconsistent” benefits, while eight found that “neonicotinoid treatments did not provide any significant yield benefit.”

The plaintiffs say the treated seeds do, however, excel at killing wildlife.

“A single seed coated with a neonicotinoid insecticide is enough to kill a songbird,” Cynthia Palmer, director of pesticides science and regulation at the American Bird Conservancy, said in a press release. “There is no justification for EPA to exempt these pesticide delivery devices from regulation.”