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 « La faillite de l’évaluation des pesticides sur les abeilles ». All quotes, originally in French, were translated by me.
A report commissioned by EFSA highlighted significant weaknesses in the risk assessment procedures for plant protection products on bees. (Boesten et al. 2012) These fail to take into account, among others, the sublethal effects (ref to the PloS One study in the previous article), exposure by guttation or by dust produced by coated seeds during sowing, the effects on larvae, etc. Taken together, the toxicity of the substances tested would be greatly underestimated.
This is nevertheless be an “open secret” and the durability of these errors result from the methods of defining the evaluation protocols. The latter is in fact set by the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO), which would delegate the task to the ICPBR (“International Commission on Plant-Bee Relationships”), through a process dominated by representatives of the agrochemical industry.
This article, highly misinformating, is further discussed in the chapter 4.I..