Day: January 7, 2019

High up in the Bolivian cloud forest, a woman tends to her bees, smoker in hand, working from hive to hive under a canopy of leaves to delicately gather panels of honeycomb. It’s a bucolic scene that experts say won’t last, for the bees are dying.

The culprit — as in so many other cases across the world — is pesticide. The difference in Bolivia is that pesticide use, along with the coca plantations it is being used to protect, is on the rise.

Environmentalists and beekeepers like Rene Villca say the bee population is being decimated by massive and intensive use of chemical pesticides to protect the region’s biggest cash crop.

Here in the idyllic Nor Yungas region north of the cloud-high capital La Paz, the pesticides are taking a toll on Villca’s hives.

“Of the 20 hives I have, 10 are producing normally and 10 are not.”

On another part of the mountain where Nancy Carlo Estrada tends to her bees, a canopy of protective netting around her head, Exalto Mamami wades through a waist-high coca plantation, pumping out liquid pesticide from a canister on his back, face covered with a long cloth against harmful blowback from the spray.

He is all too aware of the pesticide’s toxicity, but has other priorities.

“We use pesticides because the pests eat through the coca leaves and this affects our income. The plants can dry out and that way we as coca farmers lose out economically,” said Mamani.

The sale of coca leaves — the base component of cocaine — is legal in this part of Bolivia. They are sold openly for traditional use in the local towns. It is chewed, used for making teas, and in religious and cultural ceremonies.

According to the latest survey by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, Bolivia has 24,500 hectares under coca cultivation, an increase of 7.0 percent in a year. The government is collaborating with the UNODC in alternate development programs but despite this, between 35 and 48 percent is destined for cocaine production.

Coca cultivation expanding

On the steep slopes of the region’s valleys, the lush forest is pockmarked with small plots of coca arranged in terraces.

“The area of coca cultivation has expanded and the native forest has been reduced to alarming levels,” said Miguel Limachi, an entomologist at La Paz’s San Andres University.

Limachi says the expansion of coca cultivation has helped to destroy other plants that provide a natural defense against the coca-leaf pests, particularly the Tussock Moth.

In other parts of the Andes, the pale moth has been used as a biological weapon against coca cultivation.

“A monoculture is more at risk from pests or fungi because there is no longer native vegetation — there are no natural controllers,” Limachi explained. “And then more pesticides are used in higher concentrations.”

Harmful organophosphates in the pesticides mean the bees — “a social insect and extremely organized,” according to Limachi — become disorganized, and less able to feed and care for larvae.

In recent years across the globe, bees have been mysteriously dying off from “colony collapse disorder” blamed party on pesticides, but also on mites, viruses and fungi.

The danger of increased pesticide use in the Bolivian highlands is that they “remain in the soil, on the surface of the plants and obviously contaminate all the organisms present — both the growers themselves, their children and their families, and the wildlife,” Limachi told AFP.

Pesticides are also used to protect other crops in the country such as coffee plantations and some tropical fruits.

‘Growers have no choice’

For Exalto Mamani, there is no other option but to use pesticides.

“Many of the coca growers are aware that we are affecting the environment with these chemicals, but we have no other alternative because the coca supports us and gives us the economy to support our family,” he said.

He says climate change has meant coca leaf pests are on the increase.

Limachi agrees that climate change has played a role in reducing bee populations.

“Very dry years and other years that have too much rain change the availability of flowers from which the bees use to feed the hives,” he said.

Other human factors also play a role, he said.

“Electromagnetic pollution, the emission of cellular waves, microwaves, radios, television…all that can affect their communication and the operation of the hive because they interrupt processes such as food collection, care of the larvae or cleanliness of the colony,” said Limachi.

On the lush steep slopes around Coroico, beekeeper Villca has no doubt about the immediate threat to his bees.

“We hope that the coca producers realize the value of this golden insect,” he said.
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Heavy rains that brought additional pollution downstream last year contributed to the first decline in a decade to the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay, according to a report released Monday.

The bay’s health grade sank from a C-minus in 2016 to a D-plus in the 2018 State of the Bay, a biennial report issued by the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

The bay scored a 33 out of a possible 100 after scientists measured 13 indicators in three categories, including pollution, habitat and fisheries. The report cited record rains last year that brought large amounts of pollutants downstream, mostly from Pennsylvania, but also from other regions.

“Simply put, the bay suffered a massive assault in 2018,” said Will Baker, the group’s president. “The bay’s sustained improvement was reversed in 2018, exposing just how fragile the recovery is.”

Beth McGee, a senior scientist at the foundation, which has released the report on the bay’s health since 1998, also highlighted the effect of the rains, which washed enormous amounts of debris from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania south into Maryland waters and into the nation’s largest estuary.

“While some indicators improved or stayed the same, scores for the bay’s two systemic pollutants — nitrogen and phosphorous — decreased substantially, reflecting increased loads caused by the high rainfall in 2018 and above average loads in 2017,” McGee said. “The score for water clarity also dropped — another casualty of the record rain.”

Still, Baker highlighted good news as well. Bay grasses remain intact, and recent studies have shown an improving trend in the long term for underwater dead zones, which are low-oxygen conditions that can suffocate underwater life and shrink habitat.

“The good news is there are signs the bay is developing a resilience that may help it overcome long-term damage caused by record storms and rainfall which dump polluted runoff into our waters,” Baker said.

Water goals needed

Baker said the bay is facing some of the most serious challenges ever seen. The Susquehanna River, which supplies about half of the bay’s fresh water, is “severely polluted,” Baker said, and pollution attached to sediment that once stayed largely behind the Conowingo Dam is no longer trapped behind the dam’s walls.

Stormwater runoff from urban and suburban areas continue to be a source of growing pollution, Baker said, and he criticized President Donald Trump’s policies affecting the environment and denial of climate change.

To improve the bay’s health, Baker said jurisdictions in the bay’s watershed, including Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia, must meet clean water goals set for 2025.

“Second, the Trump administration must stop trying to eliminate environmental laws and regulations that have enjoyed decades of bipartisan support, and third climate change must be addressed now,” Baker said.
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Here’s a simple statistic: by 2030, the number of knee replacement surgeries in the U.S. alone is expected to rise over 600 percent. But researchers at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center are now offering an alternative that can relieve the pain and slow the osteoarthritis that most often leads to the need for knee replacement. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A leap in technology has allowed scientists to take their DNA labs out into the fields, so farmers can identify diseases quickly and tackle the problem before their crops die, or the virus spreads to neighboring farms. Faith Lapidus reports.
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