‘Bees are sentinels’: mass bee die-offs signal the wider impact of Brazil’s pesticide boom
Brazil’s vast plantations, agribusiness-friendly policies and tropical fecundity have made it an agricultural superpower – and, our data reveals, the world’s largest user of highly hazardous pesticides.
The footage is unpleasant to watch: thousands of bees writhe, disoriented, on the ground in front of their hive. The dead bodies of thousands more lie beneath them.
But the smell, said beekeeper Aldo Machado, is even worse.
“Dead bees smell like dead rats,” he said. “The smell is very strong, it really is. It’s like any other meat.”
Half a billion bees are estimated to have died from December 2018 to January 2019 in southern Brazil. Machado, vice-president of Rio Grande do Sul’s beekeeping society, has been hearing reports of die-offs since 2013.
Machado sent samples of his bees for analysis, which showed that they were contaminated with an insecticide called fipronil, commonly used to control ants and termites on soy crops.
Brazil – home to as much as 20 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity – is a heavy user of pesticides. An analysis by Unearthed and Public Eye of more than $20bn of global agrochemical sales data for 2018 showed Brazil was the world’s biggest consumer of pesticides classed as seriously hazardous to health or the environment. These hazards included acute toxicity to humans, chronic exposure risks like cancer or reproductive failure, and high toxicity to bees.
Brazil has long had agribusiness-friendly policies, thanks in part to its powerful congressional farming lobby, known as the Bancada Ruralista, and in part to a decades-long push to leverage its vast natural resources into global influence.
“We have interference from the government, which has many people from agribusiness within it,” Wanderlei Pignati, Professor at the Centre for Environmental Studies and Occupational Health at Mato Grosso’s Federal University, told Unearthed.
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