Bayer Is Killing the Bees. People Power Will Save Them
Corporations are suing our governments and institutions over the pesticide ban. We must act in defiance
When it comes to evil corporations, Bayer is near the very top of the list. In the 1980s, it was directly involved in the deaths of literally thousands of people by knowingly selling HIV-contaminated haemophilia medication to an estimated 10,000 people in the US as a cost-cutting technique, many of whom later died from AIDS. As recently as 2019, it settled (without admission of liability) to pay out three-quarters of a billion dollars because it had been marketing a drug which it knew could cause fatal internal bleeding and hadn’t told anybody about it. And its product Roundup, the most widely-used herbicide in the United States, is possibly carcinogenic to humans; the jury is still very much out. This year, though, the company announced it would be paying out close to ten billion dollars to settle over 125,000 litigations against it from people who are certain their cancer was caused by overexposure to the chemical.
The term ‘evil’ doesn’t seem so hyperbolic, does it? Now, Bayer is almost single-handedly killing the bees. One of the main risks to bees and other pollinating insects is the huge increase in toxic pesticides used on farmland which has taken place since the Second World War — and Bayer’s agrochemical subsidiary Monsanto is one of the biggest corporations in this space, with one of its chemicals, neonicotinoid, largely to blame. The effects of this (and other climate change- and deforestation-related reasons) are that pollinating insects have ‘been lost in a quarter of the places they were found in 1980’ in the UK, and overall, Brits have lost a third of their bees in the last decade. In Europe, the story is worse: around a quarter of all pollinating insects are at risk of extinction. But the US has it the worst: American beekeepers lost 40% of their honey bee population in the winter of 2018–2019.
Losing our bees would be devastating. Three quarters of all crops depend on pollinating insects, and while a famine would be unlikely if they all died out, it would mean losing many fruits and vegetables, such as blueberries, apples and cherries. While it’s possible to pollinate such crops by hand, the process is extremely labour-intensive — and, of course, costs money, which bees don’t. Not to mention the fact we’d never be able to eat honey again, and there’d be no more cotton, because bees pollinate that, too. (Imagine cotton becoming a luxury item!) Oh, and because so many industries rely on pollination from insects such as butterflies and bees, countries whose economies rely on these industries would face extreme economic hardship — including the US, whose cotton industry is worth $21 billion a year and employs over 125,000 people, and whose diary industry is second only to India’s. (Dairy cows largely live off foodstuffs made from pollinated crops.) The negative effects of losing pollinating insects are just about endless.
The quote often attributed to Albert Einstein, then, seems apt:
If bees disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.
Four years is probably too pessimistic, but life would certainly change a lot. Which is why Bayer is probably about as close to the antichrist as we’ve got: after neonicotinoid was banned by the EU in 2018 ,Bayer sued the European Union. You read that correctly: a multibillion, international corporation, that had already successfully lobbied to suppress an initial discussion of whether these chemicals should be banned in 2015, began a lawsuit against the EU, despite absolutely having the resources to come up with a non-toxic alternative to neonicotinoid. Legal action in fact started in 2013 after the company Syngenta threatened the EU with much the same thing (and Bayer got involved), which means the lawsuit has actually been going on for the better part of a decade. The ban, though enforced by the EU, was mostly pushed through by people power in the form of masses of petitions and letters delivered through websites like SumOfUs and Change.org, as well as protests by Greenpeace and even Bayer shareholders. Yet in the face of all this opposition, Bayer and other companies still decided to sue.
Which makes it all the more ludicrous when it then claims it gives a toss about the health of our bees. Bayer has a website dedicated to its ‘Bee Care Program’, the homepage of which states
Bayer has proudly dedicated more than 30 years to ensuring the protection of pollinators.
Which should really read, ‘Bayer has proudly dedicated more than 30 years to the destruction of the environment and any and all pollinators in the vicinity.’ The website publishes articles on things like pollinator-friendly recipes and small-time beekeepers who ‘share the benefits of bees with their community’ , all the while failing to note the irony that one of Bayer’s main products, its pesticide, has been linked time and time and time and time again to the extinction of the insect pollinators it pretends to care about.
Bayer and its subsidiary Monsanto have so much clout — political and economic — that action against them is difficult. However, the fact they’ve been forced to pay out in hundreds of thousands of lawsuits shows they’re not untouchable; and again, the reason the ban was implemented by the EU first temporarily in 2013 and permanently in 2018 was largely due to people power, rather than the genuine concern of politicians. The ban on neonicotinoid is a monumental step in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go — apart from blocking harmful pesticides, we must protect bee-friendly environments, particularly those places where wildflowers grow in abundance. As corporations become richer and richer and are able, with that money, to amass huge amounts of political power, it falls to us regular people to take a stand and prevent further destruction of our wildlife populations. We must continue to sign petitions, write letters, and protest to protect our planet — and in doing this, we will save our bees.
