This page is a part of the corpus (Annexe 1) used to write Stéphane Foucart and neonicotinoids.
Here, I relate what the journalist said in his article “Parmi les experts du principal rapport sur la pollinisation, deux salariés de l’industrie chimique”. All quotes, originally in French, were translated by me.
Two employees of agrochemical companies have important roles in the IPBES report on pollinators:
- Christian Maus is the main author of the chapter on “pollinator diversity” and employed by Bayer.
- Helen Thompson, employed by Syngenta, is in charge of the one on the causes of their decline.
This damages the credibility of IPBES.
IPBES Vice President Robert Watson puts it into perspective: “There are only two salaried industry scientists out of the nearly 80 researchers participating in the report.” This had already been denounced in 2014 in a publication by three researchers: Axel Hochkirch, Philip McGowan and Jeroen van der Sluijs, who also criticized “the lack of explicit rules in the appointment and selection of experts“.
The controversy would be all the more serious as Helen Thompson was engaged in another controversy, on a FERA study concluding in 2013 to the lack of effect of NNI on bumblebees, while a reanalysis of the raw data by Dave Goulson in 2015 in PeerJ concluded otherwise (Goulson 2015). (also mentionned in (21))
Christian Maus never published any work on this subject.