January 4,
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.
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