MEPs welcomed, on Thursday 16 March, the legitimate demands of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) ‘Save Bees and Farmers! Towards a bee-friendly agriculture for a healthy environment’.
However, they expressed different positions on the degree of ambition of measures to ban pesticides to best preserve bee populations (see EUROPE 13106/11).
On behalf of the European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment, Bas Eickhout (Greens/EFA, Netherlands) was critical of the current Common Agricultural Policy.
“So something has to change. And this is really a question for the European Commission”. He called on the Commission to legislate to “make us less dependent on pesticides, fertilisers, antibiotics, because that is the model that has to change for bees and farmers”.
Norbert Lins (EPP, German), on behalf of the European Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture, stressed that farmers too, and not only bees, “are an essential part of our ecosystem, because without them there is no harvest and no food”. It is therefore necessary, according to him, to develop “practical and feasible solutions” with farmers.
The most recent data showed the need for “a significant intensification of policies to better preserve habitats and agricultural areas so that they become a key vector for biodiversity restoration”, stressed Ana Miranda (Greens/EFA, Spanish). She said she fully supports the goal of full protection of bees and other pollinators, which are in steep decline both in the EU and worldwide. Some 9% of bee species are threatened, bee populations have declined by 37% and up to 40% of bee species may be threatened, according to Miranda.
On behalf of the European Commission, Mairead McGuinness said she hoped that the recently updated EU rules for the approval of micro-organisms used in plant protection will facilitate access to biological alternatives to chemical pesticides. “We also need to acknowledge that farmers need workable alternatives to allow them to continue to supply consumers with food”, the Commissioner continued.
In addition, the revision of the European Pollinator Initiative, adopted last January, and the forthcoming revision of the ‘bee guidance document’ on the risk assessment of pesticides “will boost the protection of bees and wild pollinators”, Ms McGuinness added.
Answer in April. An analysis by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) shows that biodiversity loss is a major threat to the EU’s food security, the Commission said. “We will present our overall conclusions on this ECI, including the steps we intend to take, in our communication scheduled for early April”, concluded Ms McGuinness. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)