The European Union is exporting more than 10,000 tons of bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides a year to megadiverse countries despite having banned these chemicals from its own farms to protect pollinators, according to research by Public Eye & Unearthed. Lynn Fries interviews Laurent Gaberell on GPEnewsdocs.

• Transcript

LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries, producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. In this segment, guest Laurent Gaberell will discuss the new Public Eye investigative report that puts the crucial role of pollination and the global threat to biodiversity and food security posed by bee killing pesticides in the spotlight.

A report that for the first time reveals the full scale of the European Union export trade in bee killing pesticides. The report sheds light on the double standard that’s been at play as the EU continues to export huge quantities of this pesticide despite having banned the use of these chemicals in their own fields.

Our guest, Laurent Gaberell, joins us from Public Eye in Lausanne where he’s an agriculture and food expert on the research and policy team. Public Eye is a Swiss not-for-profit organization with a longstanding record of fighting against injustice that has a significant link to Switzerland. Welcome, Laurent.

LAURENT GABERELL: Hello.

FRIES: So Laurent, we’ll be talking about key findings of this new Public Eye report. Start briefly by first telling us something about Public Eye and also your own area of expertise on the research and policy team. And from there, the collaboration between Public Eye and Unearthed in investigating Europe’s export trade in banned pesticides. Which I understand this report is the most recent collaboration.

GABERELL: Yes, indeed. So you summarized it pretty well. Public Eye is a Swiss NGO acting as a watchdog. Looking at what Swiss multinational companies and in general Swiss politics are doing abroad mainly in poor countries of the Global South.

We look at all the sectors, the economic sectors that are key in Switzerland such as the banking sector, the trading sector, the pharmaceutical companies and pesticides because in Switzerland we have the number one in the market which is called Syngenta. This is the reason why we are interested in the topic of pesticides. It’s because in Switzerland we have the number one of the market.

I’m the food and agriculture expert at Public Eye dealing with this topic of pesticides, looking at Syngenta and its activities in developing countries. We’ve been looking now for several years at the topic of banned pesticides being sold abroad by Swiss companies or banned pesticides being exported from Switzerland or the European Union to poor countries.

This new investigation on the export of banned neonicotinoids from Europe is the latest in a series of investigations that we’ve done as a collaboration with Unearthed, which is the investigative unit of Greenpeace UK, looking at the export of banned pesticides from Europe.

FRIES: So this banned pesticide that we’re talking about, I understand, is chemically related to nicotine. And you get a clue of that from the name. Is that right?

GABERELL: Completely right. Yeah. It’s from the same family. So we’re talking about neonicotinoids derived from the same family as nicotine. But in this case developed to act as insecticides to protect crops.

FRIES: This new investigation has for the first time revealed the full scale of the European Union’s export trade in neonicotinoids or neonics for short. Start by talking about what has been called out as the double standard in the EU export trade of these neonics and from there we’ll get into key findings of your investigation

GABERELL: This case of the neonics is really the strongest example of the double standard at play when it comes to regulating dangerous pesticides in the EU.

Those insecticides were banned from all outdoor users in the Union in 2018. And then they were finally taken out of the market in 2020 because of the danger they pose to pollinators and bees. There was like huge evidence, overwhelming evidence of the impact that they can have on bees and pollinators.

So, the European Union decided to take them out of the market a few years ago already. But they keep allowing companies to produce those chemicals in Europe to export them to third countries.

It’s really the classic example of this double standard where you ban dangerous pesticides in your own country because you consider it too dangerous but you keep exporting it to other countries. That’s the double standard at play.

But, I was saying this is the strongest example of this double standard because in this specific case of the neonicotinoids, the European Commission considered them such a threat to pollinators worldwide and to food security that they even decided to act on the import of food made with those chemicals.

So in February this year, the European Commission decided to ban, to lower down to zero the residue limits for neonicotinoids in food. And what does that mean? It means basically that you’re not allowed anymore to export to the European Union foods that contain residue of neonicotinoids.

And the European Commission in its own decision to ban those residues said that there’s a big problem with the decline of pollinators worldwide. That the decline of pollinators represents a threat to food security. Because they’re pollinating crops and that there’s large evidence that neonicotinoids play a key role in the decline of bees and pollinators worldwide.

And so the European Union needs to take action and it’s not enough to ban those pesticides in the Union, the European Union. The threat is so big that the Union needs also to act on the import to make sure that no food that is consumed in the European Union was made with those bee-killing pesticides.

So that was quite a strong decision that was made by the European Commission in February this year (2023). It shows you how big a threat those neonics represent in the view of the Commission. But at the same time, what we are showing in this investigation is that the European Union keeps exporting those pesticides to third countries.

So they ban the use of those pesticides in the Union to protect bees. They even ban the import of foods made with those pesticides to protect bees and pollinators but they keep allowing their export from the European Union to other countries.

FRIES: Laurent, what kind of volume are we are talking about here? And what companies and countries have you identified as involved in this EU export of banned bee killing pesticides.

GABERELL: What we found is that in 2021, the European Union approved the export of more than 13,000 tons of ban