Methodology

This website analyses voting records of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on policies relevant to bees, pollinators and beekeeping based on their choices over the last 5 years of the legislature, showing how coherent they have been in their votes for their protection and that of the planet and EU farming. MEPs were then given a score depending on how they voted.

Context

For some years now, EU pollinators have been experiencing a catastrophic situation, with managed honey bees experiencing national annual colony losses ranging from 2-33%1 and wild pollinators showing negative population trends, with 9% of the species being under extinction2. The EU Green Deal ambitions and targets3 for sustainability were necessary to stop the situation from degrading even further. The beekeeping sector had to overcome the costs of losing their production means and experiencing years of poor productivity because of climate change. When they managed to produce, the unloyal competition of “fake honey” (fraudulent honey produced from syrups and not from nectar4) made the selling prices collapse5. Legislators like the Members of the European Parliament (elected by citizens) and the national Member States (represented by the Council of the EU) were requested to create policies that could solve the situation.

Which policies were selected?

We examined MEPs voting records across 12 key votes over the last five years. The votes were selected by BeeLife based on the policies that were pollinator/beekeeping-relevant. We explain why we consider them relevant to reveal the MEPs’ voting motivation or choices. These include:

  1. The EU Pollinator Initiative (2019): was the first effort from the Commission to create a holistic not legally binding (its enforcement or not has no legal constraints) strategy to stop the negative trends observed (more info here B9-0233/2019).
  2. The Revision of the EU Pollinator Initiative (2023): was a revision after 4 years of implementation of the first one, correcting and updating the actions included, if needed (more info here B9-0463/2023).
  3. The Nature Restoration Law (NRL, 2023): it is meant to be a concretisation of Green Deal ambitions concerning nature conservation, following the scientific assessment of the status of natural resources in Europe (very poor and worsening)6, The NRL aims to integrate legal targets for stopping the situation to worsen, reverting the negative trends. We have chosen three votes related to NRL because they show the motivation of MEPs to improve the situation or not:
    1. recognise the need to create a Nature Restoration Law;
    2. deal with recognising the legal responsibility of Member States to act, make Green Deal targets legally binding and consider the whole EU territory the place to take action;
    3. consider the necessary actions for restoration in agricultural ecosystems (where nature has proven to be mainly depleted) (more info here A9-0220/2023);
  4. Common Agricultural Policy (2023): The CAP 2023-2030 potentiates the transition of farming to be more climate resilient, less impactful on natural resources and have better food safety. There had been a legislative proposal that tried to water down, delay or exempt from controls and penalties the requirements in the CAP 2023-2030, allowing the non-implementation of agroecological farming practices related to good agricultural and environmental condition standards, schemes for climate, environment and animal welfare, in the national CAP Strategic Plans. This vote rejected the proposal (more info here C9-0120/2024).
  5. Resolution to improve the pesticide risk assessment of bees and pollinators (2019): It requested the Commission and Member States to decide on pesticide risk assessment and authorisation based on the acute and chronic toxicity of honey bees and that in adults and larvae, and acute toxicity of bumble bees, risks already proven by science (more info here B9-0149/2019).
  6. The Regulation on Sustainable Use of Pesticides (2023): The Sustainable Use of Pesticide Regulation (SUR) has been a conflicting dossier within the European Parliament (chemically-based agriculture vs low-impact agriculture). The proposal would have transformed the existing Directive (2009/128/EC) into a Regulation which would be directly binding and uniformly applicable to all Member States, which is not the case today. The SUR established the ways to achieve pesticide reduction targets set up by the Green Deal. Two votes have been considered:
    1. the vote in which the Parliament rejected the legislative proposal done by the European Commission;
    2. the vote in which Parliamentarians requested to establish explicit rules and conditions for imported agricultural and agri-food products from third countries (these should follow the same pesticide use standards and safety as EU farmers). The latter vote avoids unfair competition of imported products with EU farmers, which has been one of the main claims of the farming community in the latest mobilisation (more info here A9-0339/2023).
  7. The New Genomic Techniques (new-GMOs) Regulation (2023): The European Commission proposed to legislators a text that created two categories of GMOs, Category 1 includes organisms whose genome has been modified by 20 nucleotides or less to the original organism, and Category 2 if modifications are larger than 20 nucleotides. The decision behind this threshold of 20 nucleotides has been questioned as it does not have scientific background. Cat. 1 organisms would neither require any risk assessment before their authorisation, nor any labelling or traceability system. NGOs and consumer organisations criticised the proposal for being unscientific7, not based on the precautionary principle, not allowing its implementation, violating the consumer right to know what they eat and contributing to further deregulating the presence of plants produced from new-GMOs (more info here A9-0014/2024). We considered the following votes:
    1. the vote in which the Parliament rejected the initial legislative proposal of the Commission.
    2. the vote in which some parliamentarians explicitly included more references to the two categories so that their regulation would be different.
    3. The Honey Directive (2023): The revision of the Honey Directive was highly awaited by the beekeeping sector in Europe. Key elements are included in this vote: transparency regarding the origin of blended honey, traceability, and the fight against fraud at the international level to protect European beekeepers and consumers (more info here A9-0385/2023).

    There are two limitations to the vote selection:

    • Data for individual MEPs are only available if the European Parliament has decided to vote on an item in a roll-call vote. This is only the case for a minority of all votes in the European Parliament. For the majority of votes, no data for individual MEPs is available. This restricts the selection of votes from which the voting choices can be obtained. It could be possible that other more relevant votes would have been preferable to include in the analysis.
    • Data is only available for Plenary sessions (when the whole European Parliament sits together). However, many texts voted on at the Plenary session represent compromises discussed and voted on beforehand at the committees’ level. There are 22 committees at the European Parliament ranging from Foreign Affairs and Budget Control to Women’s Rights and Gender Equality and Regional Development. No individual voting records of this crucial decision-making stage are available, which makes it impossible to include them in the scorecards.

    These limitations mean that not all votes important for an issue could be included in the scorecards and that some of the votes represented compromises that do not fully reflect BeeLife’s point of view.

    Score calculation

    MEPs can be asked to vote on a complete report, a single amendment, several amendments put together or part of an amendment (split). We call all of these “voted items”. For each “voted item” an MEP can vote yes, no, or abstain. The MEP can also choose not to vote or stay away from the plenary session, which is recorded as absent. If she/he votes what we recommended, we count 1, if against -1. All others (abstentions and absences) are counted as 0.

    We then rank all the MEPs between 0 for the least Bee coherent, and 100 for the most Bee coherent. A score of 100 does not mean they voted to all votes as recommended. It means it is the best voting record compared to all other MEPs. It is the same for a score of 0: not 100% doing the opposite of what is recommended, but being the lowest score. Vote corrections have not been included in the scorecards, since they do not have any effect on the outcome of the vote. More on this here.

    Absences from votes were considered neutral, and they received 0 points because no data shows whether the absence was legitimate, e.g., disease, or due to a lack of interest.

    Party/Group/Country score

    We take the score of each MEP belonging to a Party/Group/Country and calculate the average. When exploring the data, it may be noticed that some MEPs from the same national political Party belong to different Groups in the European Parliament. That is the way the European Parliament works.

    Participation

    For each MEP, we give one point if she/he voted for or against the item or abstained (no matter what we recommend), and zero if they were absent. This total is then divided by the total number of voted items, and the percentage calculated. For example, an MEP who votes yes or no or abstains all the time will get a 100% record for participation. An MEP who never votes will score 0% participation.

    The Party participation is then based on the average of their MEPs.

    Graphs

    Country bar chart

    The height represents the number of MEPs and the colour of its score (gradient from dark red 0 to dark green 1).

    Group pie chart

    Each slide represents the number of MEPs that are part of the political Group in the European Parliament. Several national Parties can be members of the same European political Group.

    Score bar chart

    The MEPs are ranked from 0 to 100, according to their vote. The higher the bar, the more MEPs got the same score. The average of the current selection is displayed as the big number in the middle.

    Party bubble chart

    Each national Party is represented by a bubble, its size being the number of MEPs integrated into the Party. The x-axis shows the average Party score, with lower scores on the left-hand side and higher scores on the right.

    The y-axis represents the degree of participation in votes, so the more the MEPs voted, the higher they are.

    Notes

    1. Data from COLOSS, publications available at https://coloss.org/activities/coreprojects/monitoring/  ↩

    2. Nieto et al. (2014) European Red List of Bees; van Swaay et al. (2008) European Red List of Butterflies; Hallmann et al. (2017) More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. ↩

    3. European Commission - The European Green Deal (2019). https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_6691. ↩

    4. European Commission, Health and Food Safety Directorate-General. ‘From the Hives. Sampling, Investigations and Results.’ Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union., 2023. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://food.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-03/official-controls_food-fraud_2021-2_honey_report_euca.pdf  ↩

    5. Market presentation provided by the European Commission at the Civil Dialogue Group of 22/04/2024. Available at: https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/common-agricultural-policy/cap-overview/committees-and-expert-groups/civil-dialogue-groups/animal-production_en  ↩

    6. European Commission. https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/nature-and-biodiversity/nature-restoration-law_en  ↩

    7. Regarding this "unscientific approach", it was also underlined by the French agency for the risk evaluation in its report in December 2023. More information here: https://www.anses.fr/en/content/plants-derived-new-genomic-techniques-analysis-category-1-inclusion-criteria-proposed. Anses also called for a more appropriate regulation: https://www.anses.fr/en/content/ntg-en  ↩