Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-11-19-Speech-3-416"
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"en.20081119.27.3-416"2
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"− Madam President, I would first of all like to thank Astrid Lulling very much because it is very much on her initiative that we are presenting this. As Chair, I will be presenting the report here tonight because we are extremely concerned about the situation regarding bees. What is happening to bees is very important to Europe – to the world, in fact.
For the last two years running a third of honey bees in the USA have mysteriously died. In 2007, some 800 000 colonies were wiped out. In Croatia, five million bees disappeared in less than 48 hours. In the UK, one in five honey bee hives is falling and, around the world, commercial beekeepers are reporting losses of up to 90% since 2006.
What is happening and just how serious is it for us and the future of mankind? Albert Einstein predicted that man would only have four years of life left if the bees disappeared from the Earth, so we need to take this very seriously. If you look at honey bees, they are responsible for pollinating plants and flowers which provide about a third of all the food we eat. They are nature’s top dog when it comes to pollination and without them we can say goodbye to soya beans, onions, carrots, broccoli, apples, oranges, avocados, peaches and many other foods. There would be no more strawberries. You can imagine how Wimbledon would not be able to survive without strawberries! We would not have lucerne, which is used in cattle feed. We are therefore absolutely dependent on the honey bee. Of course, they also pollinate cotton so we would not have any clothes either. We really do have to take this matter very seriously.
In China, for instance, there are virtually no honey bees in some regions and they are having to pollinate a lot of crops by hand. The 90 commercial crops grown worldwide which rely on pollination generate around GBP 30 billion a year. Bees contribute over GBP 100 million a year to the UK economy and around EUR 400 million to the European economy, so you can see quite clearly that there is a huge problem.
Therefore I would ask the Commission – and if possible I want to be able to hand over some of my time to add to Astrid Lulling’s because she was very much the driving force behind this – whether it can draw together more money for research. Having talked to the professional beekeepers and others, we know there is some mystery as to why bees are dying, partly because their condition has been very poor in the last few years and they seem to be dying literally like flies. Also there is a problem with having the right chemicals in place to cure the diseases of bees.
I think as a Commission you need not only to make money available for research but also to draw together what all the Member States are doing. It is essential that we act now. We cannot wait until all the bees have died out because the problem will be incredibly serious."@en1
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