Earlier this year, Ibama suspended foliar application of fipronil in the country after reports increased
01/17/2024
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Marcelo Ribeiro — Foto: Arquivo Pessoal
The loss of nearly 400 hives in one fell swoop last January was the trigger for beekeeper Marcelo Francisco Ribeiro of Jacuí, in the south of Minas Gerais, to file the first complaint with his region’s environmental authorities about a problem he has been facing for at least five years.
“I arrived at the first box and was shocked to see the pile of dead bees. I went to the second, to the third, around the whole apiary, and there was only one hive with live bees,” he recalls. The results of the analysis carried out at the Biological Institute of São Paulo showed the presence of 35 different pesticide active ingredients, the main ones being fipronil, thiamethoxam, and propanil.
Although there are no organized statistics on honeybee deaths in the country, the perception of defense agencies and the government itself is that they have increased in recent years, especially since 2012. “This is not an isolated case in one state. There are reports in São Paulo, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso do Sul, Santa Catarina, northern Minas Gerais, there are cases of mass death in most of the main states of the country,” said the president of the NGO Bee or not to be, Daniel Gonçalves.
The mass death of bees is not necessarily a novelty in beekeeping. “It has always happened, but never in such large numbers. We used to lose one hive per apiary, two at the most, but it’s increased too much in the last five years,” said the beekeeper. Across the country, the increase has been linked to the popularization of fipronil, an insecticide registered in Brazil since 1994 but whose patent expired in 2008, paving the way for new formulations.
In Minas Gerais alone, about a thousand hives have been lost in one year, according to Rosangela Muniz, deputy director of Ibama’s Environmental Quality Department. Earlier this year, the agency suspended foliar application of fipronil across the state as a precautionary measure. “In several cases of bee deaths that have been analyzed, fipronil is the active ingredient that appears most often. We don’t have that percentage, but we do have several reports and studies,” he notes.
Although all reports collected by the state agricultural defense services are sent to the Ministry of Agriculture, the ministry claims to have no statistics on the problem. Between 2013 and 2015, the NGO Bee or Not to Be collected self-reported data from producers who lost hives due to mass bee deaths. In a year and a half, there were 300 incidents, more than 80% of which linked to pesticide contamination.
“Of course, we weren’t able to analyze all these cases, but it was undoubtedly a very important first survey,” said Mr. Gonçalves.
In São Paulo, work carried out by the manager of the State Bee Health Program (PESAB) of the State Agricultural Defense Coordination, Renata Taveira, analyzed the results of laboratory tests of the 62 reports of bee mortality received by the agency between 2020 and 2022, and found that of this total, 49 were related to pesticide poisoning, with fipronil being the active ingredient most frequently found: 63% of the cases.
“Notifications are increasing, and we know that in reality the mortality rate is much higher,” said Ms. Taveira. In 2023, it is estimated that the state will have recorded around 50 reports of bee mortality—in 2022, there were 39 reports.
In addition to the problem itself, greater awareness among beekeepers is cited as one of the factors behind the increase in reports. In Mato Grosso, according to the Agricultural Defense Institute (Indea), there were 45 notifications in 2023, of which 13 were for poisoning. In 2022, there were five reports.
“What’s significant is that, due to other notifiable diseases, we started several campaigns to get producers to come to Indea, and this may have affected this number of cases,” said the agency’s Animal Health Defense Coordinator, João Marcelo Brandini Néspoli.
Given the evidence of damage to beekeeping, Ibama has initiated a process to re-evaluate fipronil in 2022. “It is already understood that when the pollinator [bee] is affected in this way, there is a greater ecological risk associated with the use of this active ingredient. If you kill the bee in this way, you are certainly affecting other organisms in the fauna,” said Rosangela Muniz.
Following a precautionary suspension of foliar use of fipronil in Brazil, Ibama is not ruling out the possibility of more stringent restrictions on the active ingredient in the future, when the re-evaluation period for the substance comes to an end. “The re-evaluation process started a year ago and this was a precautionary measure. We thought it would be good to suspend foliar use of fipronil, but in the end Ibama usually restricts uses and crops even more,” said Ms. Muniz.
*Por Cleyton Vilarino — São Paulo
Source: Valor International