This is a disgraceful.
Dr. Jonathan Lundgren is the award- winning scientist, who discovered that Bayer pesticides were killing bees in huge numbers, as discussed on this blog last Friday.
It appears that Dr. Lundgrun was told by the US Department of Agriculture to stop publicizing his research, which didn’t suit USDA at all. When he refused he was suspended, then fired. He attempted to continue his research in the private sector, at which point the USDA is blacklisted him from USDA-funded research grants and pressured other scientists not to collaborate with him.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is notoriously friendly with giant corporate agribusinesses, and lobbyists for big pesticide companies like Monsanto and Bayer, who don’t want government researchers looking into the impact of bee-killing pesticides. USDA is not a normal government agency; it was created expressly to promote American agriculture, not as a service to the general electorate. It is an open secret that what the big agribusinesses want they generally get.
What USDA is doing is a blatant attack on to scientific freedom at the behest of lobbyists. It is against the interests of both consumers and all food producers who rely on insect pollination.
As Epicureans we should hold the big corporations to account. They got their formulations disastrously wrong, and, instead of taking the pesticides off the market, are trying to smother the news and destroy the career of the messenger. It is sad to see this happen under President Obama’s watch.
Dr. Lundgren has fought back by filing a whistleblower complaint, a scientific integrity complaint, and a federal lawsuit. Dr. Lundgren’s case has gotten enormous press coverage, and he was personally honored with the Joe A. Calloway Award for Civic Courage—a prestigious award for public-interest activism. Meanwhile, USDA needs root and branch reform.
Latest news
A terrifying study has found that the exact same pesticides causing the massive global bee die-off are now killing birds as well.
The global bee die-off has been happening so fast that scientists are still scrambling to detect all the impacts. And now, this new study also finds that neonic pesticides are killing warblers, swallows, starlings and thrushes nearly as fast as the bees — at current rates, 35 percent of the bird population will disappear in just 10 years in the areas studied.