[JoeAltmaier]

There is testing, science etc for things like pesticides and residue. The burden has been born and carried to a conclusion. Its new claims that the testing was not good enough that have a burden - its easy to call foul or claim hidden problems, then be conveniently too exhausted to do anything about it. Sometimes its not that problems are buried; sometimes they're not real.

[Retric]

That's a perfectly rational argument, however there is a long history of pesticides turning out to be more harmful than originally thought. There are even commonly used pesticides that are known to be harmful to people that are still in common use with the assumption that the residue is not harmful.

Unfortunately, that's vary hard to test as the population for a study is much smaller than the population effected by any given pesticide. When you include environmental effects the argument generally becomes one of acceptable harm. As there is also a ridiculous oversupply of food there also clearly over used.

[specialist]

...pesticides turning out to be more harmful than originally thought.

Licenses (to sell pesticides) should be periodically reauthorized, given the current best available science. Factoring cost to benefit in the authorization, of course.

Like all these intractable policy issues, at the heart it's about governance. Right now the burden of proof (of harm) is on the critics. That's inefficient and unnecessarily adversarial.

[DanBC]

Bee death suggests that we are not always researching everything affected by pesticides.

[jqm]

This excerpt is from the NRDC.. hardly a pro-chemical group, on the disappearance of bees...

"Scientists studying the disorder believe a combination of factors could be making bees sick, including pesticide exposure, invasive parasitic mites, an inadequate food supply and a new virus that targets bees' immune systems. More research is essential to determine the exact cause of the bees' distress."

Maybe it is pesticides. But stating "maybe" as fact happens all to often and muddies the issue. I would add... bees in this case are domestic bees. Maybe they can be made resistant to said pesticides. Or are all pesticides just bad because they are bad no matter what?