OPINION:
The Obama administration has finally released its long-awaited National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and other Pollinators. It’s the federal government’s answer to the alarming claims that honeybees are disappearing, threatening many crops that rely on the bees for pollination. While it’s not clear what this strategy will achieve for the bees, we can be sure it comes with lots of government handouts, pork-barrel spending, and shortsighted pesticide policies that undermine food production.
It is true that beekeepers face some challenges raising healthy honeybee hives. Many of these result from diseases and other stresses related to using bees for pollination services. These are problems that beekeepers working with farmers and local communities can manage — and they are doing so.
There’s no reason to believe bees are in grave danger of going extinct. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data, the number of beehives kept globally has grown from nearly 50 million in 1961 to more than 80 million in 2013. In the United States hives have decreased since the 1960s, but that is because a lot of honey production has moved overseas, where there are now more hives than ever before. And the number of U.S. hives, which are mostly used for pollination services, has increased in recent years.
Still, the federal government plan has set some lofty goals to “save” the bees including: “Reduce honey bee colony losses during winter (overwintering mortality) to no more than 15 percent within 10 years.”
This goal is pure nonsense. The federal government has no control over honeybee survival rates, which ebb and flow based on such factors as weather and disease emergence. Beekeepers address such losses by splitting hives and working to improve hive health. Surveys show that beekeepers expect — and consider acceptable — losses of up to nearly 20 percent a year.
Nonetheless, the report says the government will need more than $82 million in fiscal 2016 to achieve its goals. Among the action items is “emergency” financial assistance for beekeepers who experience hive losses “in excess of normal mortality” over the winter because of “Colony Collapse Disorder or other natural causes.” Now that the strategy defines “normal” hive losses as 15 percent, there may be a whole lot of beekeepers that qualify for these government handouts. And ironically, this spending may well reward the beekeepers who do the worst job managing their hives, as funds flow to beekeepers with the highest losses.
Other items include education and habitat development for pollinators. Education includes such things as government posters and Smithsonian programs. Some of this may offer useful information, but we can expect plenty of anti-pesticide propaganda and just the right amount of alarmism to ensure bigger and bigger allocations of tax dollars every year to address this “crisis.”
Funds will also flow to government gardening projects such as the much-touted “White House Pollinator Garden,” which serves as Obama administration public relations more than anything else. It’s true that pollinators will benefit from a more diverse diet, but can’t federal activities be achieved within existing landscape budgets?
Perhaps the reason they “need” more money is because the feds also want to use the bees as an excuse to acquire more land. Specifically, the report says: “[Fish and Wildlife Service] will acquire more than 46,000 acres of land in the Midwest and Mountain Prairie Regions, which, although primarily aimed at protecting priority bird habitats, will have secondary benefits for monarchs and other pollinators.”
Yet the federal government already owns an estimated one-third or more of the nation, and its management record is poor. Clearly, we don’t need more federal landholdings. Much of the wildlife gardening can and should be done voluntarily on private land in key areas where the bees reside and near farms where bees forage.
The strategy’s biggest defect is its call for the Environmental Protection Agency to consider regulations and potential bans of a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. There’s no solid evidence that these products have any impact on honeybees in real-life settings, and there’s considerable evidence that neonicotinoids have important agricultural and environmental benefits.
These chemicals can be applied to seeds and thus don’t require spraying, so exposure to non-target insects is limited. And higher yields related to pest control products like neonicotinoids mean there’s more land left free for habitat. Bans of these valuable product will result in more crop damage, less land for wildlife, and reliance on potentially more damaging pesticides.
Finally, the strategy fails to do the one thing that the feds should do: eliminate ethanol subsidies and mandates. These policies encourage overplanting of corn, which has little value to pollinators and leaves less land available for wildlife.
The feds are not well positioned to “save” the honeybees. We’d all be better off if they would just get out of the way.
• Angela Logomasini is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the study, “Beepocalypse Not: Alarmist Honeybee Claims Collapse under Scrutiny.”
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