Brussels won’t change pesticides law to protect bees despite petition

The European Fee is not going to current new laws on pesticides with the intention to save the bee inhabitants in Europe regardless of the Citizen’s Initiative.

Multiple million European residents have since 2019 signed a European Citizen’s Initiative calling for the phase-out of artificial pesticides by 2035, to revive biodiversity, and to assist farmers within the transition.

Martin Dermine is the citizen who began the initiative. He works for the NGO Pesticide Motion Community.

“There’s a powerful hyperlink between bees, how they’re doing and the state of the atmosphere, publicity of residents to pesticides and in addition the well being of farmers,” Dermine informed Euronews.

“So this Residents initiative, by giving a powerful message to decision-makers, will certainly assist bees as a result of they’re the primary ones impacted by pesticides. And decreasing pesticides may even be higher for folks residing in rural areas, additionally residents who devour pesticides within the meals they eat and the meals they purchase”.

One in three pollinator species is in decline in Europe and 80% of the crops and wild plant species rely upon animal pollinators.

For the European Fee, the initiative offers a powerful message to the legislators because it reveals clear citizen assist. 

However the EU’s government received’t suggest any new laws, calling as an alternative for the one that’s already on the negotiation desk to be adopted. 

Beneath the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Methods the European Fee desires to cut back using pesticides.

It desires using and danger of chemical pesticides and using extra hazardous pesticides to be slashed by 50% respectively by the top of the last decade. 

Because of this within the phrases of Adalbert Jahnz, spokesperson of the European Fee, the response to the initiative is that it “is de facto time for the Parliament and the Council to search out agreements quickly on the legislative proposals that we [the European Commission] made and it’s time additionally for member states to implement in an formidable method the brand new Frequent Agriculture Coverage”. 

However it’s “not time for us now to reopen our legislative proposal or to make new legislative proposals. The important and pressing factor is to maintain the extent of ambition that the Fee has placed on the desk of the co-legislators and actually translate the ambition of residents into binding regulation.”

This was the seventh European Residents’ Initiative to have obtained a response by the Fee after having reached the edge of 1 million signatures in no less than 7 totally different member states. 9 different ECIs didn’t attain the required threshold.