Follow the Honey: 7 Ways Pesticide Companies Are Spinning the Bee Crisis

Michele Simon is a public health lawyer specializing in food industry marketing and lobbying tactics and author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines our Health and How to Fight Back. She is also the president of Eat Drink Politics, a consulting firm on food and beverage industry tactics, based in Oakland. You can follow her blog and find her on Twitter. If you like to eat, then you should care about what’s happening to bees. Two-thirds of our food crops require pollination–the very foods that we rely on for healthy eating–such as apples, berries, and almonds, just to name a few. That’s why the serious decline in bee populations is getting more attention, with entire campaigns devoted to saving them. A strong and growing body of evidence points to exposure to a class of neurotoxic pesticides called neonicotinoids—the fastest-growing and most widely used class of synthetic pesticides—as a key contrib­uting factor to bee declines. The European Union banned the three most widely used neonicotinoids, based on strong science indicating that neonics can kill bees outright and make them more vulnerable to pests, pathogens, and other stressors. Enter the corporate spin doctors. As my new report with Friends of the Earth details, three of the leading pesticide corporations—Bayer, Syngenta, and Monsanto— are engaged in a massive public relations disinformation campaign to distract the public and policymakers from thinking that pesticides might have something to do with bee death and destruction.