What’s wrong with our EPA? What’s wrong with our EPA? For all
that is good and honorable in our food system, we should not cut
off the nose to spite the face. Indeed, big agribusiness is
problematic here as are GMOs (greedily modified organisms) such
as Bt corn. Anyone who’s been stung by a bee knows they can
inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a
strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an
outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70
crops they pollinate — from almonds to apples to blueberries —
in peril. Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has
died down, commercial beekeepers have seen average population
losses of about 30 percent each year since 2006, said Paul
Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the
organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and
environmental groups this week to tackle the challenges facing
the beekeeping industry and the agricultural economy by proxy.
“We are inching our way