Beemageddon: Syngenta Wants Increase in Pesticide Levels

Chris Carrington

Syngenta is asking federal regulators to increase the allowable levels of some pesticides, even though experts have linked the chemicals to massive bee die offs.

The company wants the Environmental Protection Agency to pass an increase of 4.9 parts per million of thiamethoxan. The current allowable level is 0.1ppm, Syngenta wants it increased to 5.0ppm. You can read the details on the regulations.gov website which published the request on September 5th. The request itself was filed on August 22nd.

Tiffany Stacker of E&E reports:

This Discovery Makes Bee Die-Off Problem That Much Worse

Heather Callaghan

Many arrows point to the bee decline. A Harvard professor recently warned that Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is only the beginning for us. The ripple effect from new classes of pesticides is just getting started.

But there's more...

The problems they face can be compared to a kaleidoscope, where the shapes are layered, interconnected, many and morphing.

It's not only pesticides that lead to pollinator death - it's more. It's other things, the combination of things, thought to be harmless to bees and to humans.

Harvard Professor Warns, CCD is Only the First Alarm Bell from Bees

Anthony Freda Art

Heather Callaghan

While chemical corporations and critics of bee activists want people to remain focused on addressing symptoms of colony collapse disorder, and fund research aimed at that goal, one Harvard PhD stands out as he presses on pesticides.

Researcher and Harvard professor, Chengsheng (Alex) Lu,  has been outspoken about the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides and their contribution to colony collapse disorder. Especially so, since conducting his own tests for a number of years now. 

But he now warns that a pollinator drop could be the least our worries at this point. That it may be a sign of things to come - bees acting as the canary in the coalmine. That not only are we connected to bees through our food supply, but that the plight that so afflicts them may very well soon be our own.

Massive Bumblebee Die-Off Prompts Temporary Pesticide Ban in Oregon

Alex Pietrowski

In what may be the single largest mass bumblebee die-off on record, some 50,000 plus bees were recently found littering the parking lot of a Target store in Wilsonville, Oregon recently after a landscaping company sprayed surrounding trees with the insecticide Safari. Concerning shoppers and the community, the event also raised significant alarm amongst the Oregon Department of Agriculture, which has now enacted a temporary ban on the pesticide used in this incident, and for an additional 17 other insecticide products containing the chemical dinotefuran.

Dinotefuran, a popular insecticide found in agricultural, professional and household products is an insecticide of the neonicotinoid class, a class of insecticides widely suspected to be the primary cause of the global bee and pollinator die-off we are witnessing today. Neonicotinoids include a number of other insecticides other than dinotefuran, and have for decades been suspected of being especially dangerous to bees:

Honeybee Extinction = Global Collapse

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Corn pesticides are killing off waves of honeybees, and the effects could spell disaster for life on Earth. Will the pollinators of most of our plants get wiped out by mankind and take us with them?


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HFCS Food for Bees Found to Increase Colony Collapse Disorder

Heather Callaghan

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A study released on Monday shows that cheaper honey substitutes such as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and sugar (made from genetically modified sugar beets) are contributing to massive bee death via Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) by depriving bees of crucial nutrients, which weakens their immune systems.

Sadly, U.S. bee keepers were devastated by the loss of nearly one-third of their cross-pollinating, food co-creator colonies this past winter alone. That finding is close to the yearly average decline over the past six years, making the cumulative data a great concern for the species and crops. Scientists still like to play it safe and say the decline that's damaging the food supply is largely unexplained, but neonicotinoid pesticides have one of the biggest roles in the loss. And, they have everything to do with why HFCS fed to bees is further killing them.

According to researchers at the University of Illinois in the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 28:

Industry’s war on nature: ‘What are the bees telling us?’

Honey Bee/Wikimedia Commons image

Rady Ananda, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

While industries continue to pollute the planet with their toxic chemicals, toxic waste and toxic spills, Earth’s pollinators sing a swan song that leaves no doubt as to the folly of modern civilization.  Our ability to hear and appropriately respond to the crisis of declining pollinators will determine humanity’s survival.

“In 1923, Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian scientist, philosopher and social innovator, predicted that in 80 to 100 years honeybees would collapse.”  Queen of the Sun

Steiner believed the industrialization of bees would lead to their demise. It looks like he was right. In the past two decades, the United States has lost 100-300 billion bees, and the problem has spread to Europe and beyond. But several factors above industrialized beekeeping operations contribute to this massive die-off.

7 Reasons Food Shortages Will Become a Global Crisis

Activist Post 

Food inflation is here and it's here to stay.  We can see it getting worse every time we buy groceries. Basic food commodities like wheat, corn, soybeans, and rice have been skyrocketing since July, 2010 to record highs.  These sustained price increases are only expected to continue as food production shortfalls really begin to take their toll this year and beyond.

This summer Russia banned exports of wheat to ensure their nation's supply, which sparked complaints of protectionism.  The U.S. agriculture community is already talking about rationing corn over ethanol mandates versus supply concerns. We've seen nothing yet in terms of food protectionism.

Global food shortages have forced emergency meetings at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization where they claim "urgent action" is needed.  They point to extreme weather as the main contributing factor to the growing food shortages.  However, commodity speculation has also been targeted as one of the culprits.

It seems that the crisis would also present the perfect opportunity and the justification for the large GMO food companies to force their products into skeptical markets like in Europe and Japan, as recently leaked cables suggest.  One thing is for sure; food shortages will likely continue to get worse and eventually become a full-scale global food crisis.

Here are seven reasons why food shortages are here to stay on a worldwide scale:


1. Extreme Weather: Extreme weather has been a major problem for global food; from summer droughts and heat waves that devastated Russia’s wheat crop to the ongoing catastrophes from 'biblical flooding' in Australia and Pakistan.  And it doesn’t end there.  An extreme winter cold snap and snow has struck the whole of Europe and the United States. Staple crops are failing in all of these regions making an already fragile harvest in 2010 even more critical into 2011.  Based on the recent past, extreme weather conditions are only likely to continue and perhaps worsen in the coming years.

2. Bee Colony Collapse: The Guardian reported this week on the USDA's study on bee colony decline in the United States: "The abundance of four common species of bumblebee in the US has dropped by 96% in just the past few decades." It is generally understood that bees pollinate around 90% of the world's commercial crops.  Obviously, if these numbers are remotely close to accurate, then our natural food supply is in serious trouble.  Luckily for us, the GMO giants have seeds that don't require open pollination to bear fruit.

3. Collapsing Dollar: Commodity speculation has resulted in massive food inflation that is already creating crisis levels in poor regions in the world. Food commodity prices have soared to record highs mainly because they trade in the ever-weakening dollar. Traders will point to the circumstances described in this article to justify their gambles, but also that food represents a tangible investment in an era of worthless paper.  Because the debt problems in the United States are only getting worse, and nations such as China and Russia are dropping the dollar as their trade vehicle, the dollar will continue to weaken, further driving all commodity prices higher.

4. Regulatory Crackdown: Even before the FDA was given broad new powers to regulate food in the recent Food Safety Modernization Act, small farms were being raided and regulated out of business.  Now, the new food bill essentially puts food safety under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security where the food cartel uses the government to further consolidate their control over the industry. Militant police action is taken against farmers suspected of falling short on quality regulations. It is the power to intimidate innocent small farmers out of the business.

5. Rising oil prices: In 2008, record oil prices that topped $147 per barrel drove food prices to new highs.  Rice tripled in 6 months during the surge of oil prices, along with other food commodities.  The price of oil affects food on multiple levels; from plowing fields, fertilizers and pesticides, to harvesting and hauling.  Flash forward to 2011:  many experts are predicting that oil may reach upwards of $150-$200 per barrel in the months ahead.  As oil closed out 2010 at its 2-year highs of $95/bbl, it is likely on pace to continue climbing.  Again, a weakening dollar will also play its part in driving oil prices, and consequently, food prices to crisis levels.

6. Increased Soil Pollution: Geo-engineering has been taking place on a grand scale in the United States for decades now.  Previously known in conspiracy circles as 'chemtrailing,' the government has now admitted to these experiments claiming they are plan "B" to combat global warming.  The patents involved in this spraying are heavy in aluminum.  This mass aluminum contamination is killing plants and trees and making the soil sterile to most crops.  In an astonishing coincidence, GMO companies have patented aluminum-resistant seeds to save the day.

7. GMO Giants: Because of growing awareness of the health affects of GM foods, several countries have rejected planting them. Therefore, they would seem to need a food crisis to be seen as the savior in countries currently opposed to their products.  A leaked WikiLeaks cable confirms that this is indeed the strategy for GMO giants, where trade secretaries reportedly “noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.” Since GMO giants already control much of the food supply, it seems they can also easily manipulate prices to achieve complete global control of food.

The equation is actually quite simple: food is a relatively inelastic commodity in terms of demand. In other words, people need to eat no matter how bad the economy gets.  Thus, demand can be basically measured by the size of the population. Therefore, as demand remains steady while the 7 supply pressures outlined above continue to worsen, food prices will have only one place to go -- up, up, and up.

As international agencies scramble to find "solutions," their energy may be just as well spent on questioning if this famine scenario is being purposely manipulated for profits.  Regardless, the average person would be very wise to stock up on food staples as an investment, and frankly to survive the worsening food crisis.

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Honeybee collapse due to toxic combination of pesticide chemicals

David Gutierrez
Natural News

Researchers from Dundee University, Royal Holloway and University College London are set to carry out a £1.5 million ($2.3 million) study into whether continuous exposure to a cocktail of pesticides is interfering with the brains and nervous systems of bees and other pollinators, possibly explaining their recent drastic decline.

"The landscape has changed considerably over the last 30-40 years; we've seen well-documented changes in our birds, our flora and also in some of our insects," said Andrew Watkinson of the Insect Pollinators Initiative (IPI), "but now there's a growing concern that our insect pollinators are also in decline, whether that's in terms of the number of honeybees, number of bumblebee species, butterflies and hoverflies."

The researchers have hypothesized that pesticides, many of which are neurotoxins, might be blocking the electrical signals of insect nervous systems. This could produce effects such as making it harder for bees to communicate with each other, preventing them from identifying food sources or making it hard for them to find their hive again at the end of a foraging trip.


It would take only subtle neurological changes to produce severe brain disorders, the researchers have warned.

The IPI is a £10 million program that has enlisted ecologists, computer scientists, molecular biologists and mathematicians to research the causes of pollinator decline. It is funded by the Scottish government, the U.K. department of the environment, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Wellcome Trust.

Insect pollinators are essential for the cultivation and quality of a third of the world's food crops.

"We can take for granted the variety of vegetables, fruits and flowers that we can enjoy every day, but some of the insect pollinators on which they rely are in serious decline," said Alan Thorpe of the NERC. "Understanding the complexities of environmental ecosystems is a priority that will help to ensure the survival of pollinators and the benefits they provide."

Sources for this story include: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environme....

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