A legal fight involving one of the world’s largest chemical companies could turn out to be a real buzzkill for bee lovers.
Bayer CropScience, a subsidiary of Bayer AG (FWB:BAYN), is challenging Europe’s recent ban on a class of pesticides believed to be killing off millions of bees. The two-year ban on neonicotinoids, a controversial class of insecticides, was enacted in May by the European Commission following recent scientific evidence linking the chemical to the global crash of bee populations.
Bayer CropScience is calling the ban “unjustified,” saying it goes beyond the commission’s existing regulatory framework. The German chemical giant also said the commission failed to take into account other factors that are contributing to bee die-offs, including, it says, loss of habitats, extreme environmental and climatic factors and lack of genetic diversity.
In an email to International Business Times, Utz Klages, a spokesman for Bayer CropScience, called the link between neonicotinoid compounds and bee-colony declines a “hypothesis” that has not been confirmed by targeted studies.
“Leading bee scientists around the world have concluded that a variety of factors are responsible for bee losses,” Klages said.
That position has incensed environmental advocates, who accuse the company of clouding scientific data in an effort to place profits ahead of the planet.
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