We reviewed pollinator legislation from 1967 to 2019. The laws before 1987 were subject to the 1967 constitution (Brasil, 1967) that did not contemplate environmental protection, although one federal law (Law 5197/1967) had general comments related to fauna, which was considered State property, and thus its use, pursuit, destruction, or hunting was restricted or prohibited. Nevertheless, we included the few legislative acts related to pollinators published before 1987.

Of the 314 state and municipal legal documents, most (266, 84.7%) were from states. Most of the documents were related to pesticide use (133), followed by awareness (62) and economic aspects (59) (Table 1). Meliponiculture laws only began to appear in 2009, but bee-keeping practices were legislated since 1982. Key-words related to pesticide use, economic aspects, and awareness appear almost together over time (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

The number and main categories of pollinator policies approved by Legislatures in Brazil by year.

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The region with more laws was the northeast (113), and Pernambuco State within this region had the highest number (38), most of which were related to pesticide use (15). The state with the highest number of laws related to awareness of pollinators was Rio de Janeiro (13) and only seven states have laws that are specific to Meliponiculture practices (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.

Brazilian pollinator-relevant legislation by state.

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At the National level, we found 20 federal laws related to pesticides or bees. Laws referring to pesticides included mainly regulative and/or administrative roles of agencies and products. Laws related to bees focused on bee products (honey, mead), administrative roles, or awareness (Sup 2). Below we present the six categories proposed in more detail.

We found 35 state and municipal laws related to apiculture practices. These laws were mainly related to bee-product inspection (sales, content analysis, establishments). We found one law with measures to encourage the development of beekeeping (State Law – 14009/2001 in Minas Gerais) in which bees and the native honey flora are considered objects of protection, conservation, and preservation in the State. This law is complex and integrative, attributing to the Executive Branch responsibility for preventative actions against the destruction of bees, honey or pollinators, native or not, the identification of areas with the greatest beekeeping potential in the State, regulation of beekeeping activity through the creation of instruments of quality control and origin of the products and the elaboration of a beekeeper register. It also requires the development of research aimed at improving beekeeping, production technologies, and product quality. This law contemplates the different actors involved in beekeeping, such as class representatives and cooperatives or beekeeper associations, public or private institutions giving technical assistance and rural extension, education, and research through participation in the planning and execution of the actions referred to in this article.

Some laws were propagated to increase public awareness, with the main objective to protect, conserve, valuate and foster sociobiodiversity and agricultural products. We found such laws in all Brazilian regions (North, North-east, Mid-east, South, and South-east). These laws have become more frequent in recent years; three between 1985 and 1989, nine between 1989 and 1999, and 19 after 2000.

The content of those laws is diverse, related to the inclusion of honey or organic food in school lunches; promotion of campaigns to raise awareness among rural people and entrepreneurs about the harm caused by the intensive and indiscriminate use of pesticides and soil degradation; stimulus to organic practices or products through green seals or organic markets; celebration days, such as the “State day to combat pesticides”; recognition of native bees as well as the state’s honey flora as public domain and thus being the object of protection and measures to prevent their destruction; state policy on agroecology and organic production – for example, the PEAPO (State law 21.146 in Minas Gerais) in which the main goal is to promote and encourage the development of agroecology and organic production.

About half the laws (7 of 17) within the city-planning category referred to the prohibition of beekeeping in urban areas and were spread over many years (1967, 1968, 1979, 1992, 1996, 2014). The other city-planning laws were related to city administration, with secretariats and/or public-agency structure related to providing advice and assignment of bodies for regulation or inspection of pesticides.

We found 59 laws related to economic aspects of pollination and/or bees, and they were promulgated in most of the country except for the southern region. Their main content was related to taxes (26) or tax incentives, to the transfer of funds or tax exemption for producers or companies, or as budget resources for educating beekeepers (29). Taxes related to pesticides or bees included different aspects, such as life insurance or a health-risk bonus for handling and transporting fertilizers, pesticides, and the like (Law 11.125/1994 in Pernambuco); fee exemption for empty pesticide packaging (Decree 10.471/2001); exemption from taxes on operations for products included in the National Program for Strengthening Family Agriculture – PRONAF, which deals with Article 19 of Federal Law No. 10,696, of 2 July 2003, aimed at meeting the demands for food and nutritional supplementation of the social programs of the State, under the terms of Agreement 234/2008 – SESAN, and the Term of Adhesion 119/2012, signed with the Federal Government. There were also laws related to tax benefits and rural credit for bee products (honey and related) and one law related to the allocation of funds for pesticide campaigns in State Law 21971/2016 in Minas Gerais), that could be interpreted as awareness.

We also found one decree (Decree 9.130/2017 in Goiás) related to payment for environmental services which promulgates cooperation and participation, understood as the joint action of society and the government authorities, with the scope of defending and preserving the environment for present and future generations. Sustainable development was addressed from the perspective of making economic-social development compatible with the preservation of the environment and ecological balance. These laws require that the polluter pays the costs of preventive or repair measures and protectors are recognized through compensation to those who work in the preservation, conservation, or recuperation of the environment, instituting and maintaining environmental services.

We found only nine laws related to meliponiculture, although the State Law- 14009/2001 in Minas Gerais can also be applied to meliponine bees, despite our including it in the apiculture category because this law includes the stingless bees in its first and second articles. Those laws related to meliponiculture are in general very recent; the first was created in 2013 (Law 16.171/2013) and most were published between 2017 and 2019. Those laws were present in the north, northeast, southeast, and southern regions, and have similar content. They consider management, transportation, research for commercialization or socio-cultural purposes, scientific research, promotion, environmental education, conservation, exhibition, and reproduction of stingless bees.

Pesticides are dangerous agricultural inputs that the state must regulate. The Brazilian law on pesticides (7.802/89), attributes the responsibility to the states and federal district to legislate on the use, production, consumption, trade, and storage of pesticides, their components as well as inspecting the use, consumption, trade, storage, and internal transport. This legislation also states that is up to the municipalities to legislate supplementally on the use and storage of pesticides, their components, and the like. This explains the large number of laws in states and municipalities regarding the use or restrictions on pesticides.

In some states (e.g. DF, Alagoas, Mato Grosso do Sul, and Ceará) and municipalities within states (e.g. Minas Gerais, Acre, and Espírito Santo), there are bans on the use of aircraft for spraying pesticides. This restriction only applies to some areas and not the whole state or municipality. Pesticide use is usually prohibited within a radius of ten kilometers of inhabited areas and conservation units, and this distance may be increased or decreased in certain areas (conditioned by a technical, sanitary, and environmental study). In the latter case, the minimum distance is one kilometer.

In almost all laws, pesticides are defined as the products and agents of physical, chemical, or biological processes intended for use in the storage and processing of agricultural products, in pastures, in the protection of native or planted forests, that have 50% lethal dose (DL50) less than 2 mg for bees. There is also an understanding that pesticides are useful to increase agricultural productivity, preserving the quality of the products when the application of pesticides is under the requirements of federal legislation, including the implementation of actions that aim to protect water sources and basins, the clean-up and the reforestation necessary for the potential flow of watercourses, in addition to their preservation from pesticide pollution, domestic sewage and or industry and other deleterious effects to ecosystems.

In some states, there is a clear awareness of the need to regulate the use and disposal of pesticides and their packaging. For example, the State of Pernambuco prohibits the importation, selling, or use of pesticides whose sale has been prohibited in their country of origin. Other states, such as Paraíba and Minas Gerais, require that pesticide registrants provide a waste-management plan contemplating the environmentally appropriate destination of packaging and the installation of collection centers, adopting solutions that enable reuse, recycling, treatment, and safe final disposal of packaging.

In some municipalities, there are other constraints, such as the prohibition of chemical weeding or buffer zones where pesticides are forbidden or their use is conditioned on the consent of federal agencies. On the other hand, there are also laws related to tax exemptions for insecticides, fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, parasiticides, germicides, acaricides, nematicides, rodenticides, defoliants, desiccants, spreaders, and adhesives.

Pesticides are used at high levels in the states of Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul (Censo Agropecuário IBGE/2017). In those, most laws related to pesticides (i.e. were the primary search returned the keyword pesticide and before categorization on categories described in Table 1) were regulated use, except for Rio Grande do Sul, where there were also laws related to awareness (5 of 14 pesticide-related laws). These were related to teaching in schools about ecology and pesticides and the inclusion of organic food in the school lunch.

Dangerous use of pesticides is higher in the three regions that most consume pesticides in Brazil: Midwest, South, and Southeast (Censo Agropecuário IBGE/2017). In those regions, most laws were related to pesticide use: Midwest – pesticide use (27 of 44 laws); Southeast – awareness (24 of 53) followed by pesticide use (22 of 53); and South – pesticides (19 of 27).

It is clear from the differences among laws that the regulation of pesticides is politically controversial. This topic is relevant for reasons of public health, environment, and sustainable agricultural, especially given the high growth in agricultural production and the use of pesticides in the country since the early 1990s, but it is also highly influenced by political groups (Coelho et al., 2019), reflected by several Brazilian laws to make pesticide use less strict (e.g. Law projects 6.299/2002, 1.687/2015, 3.200/2015, 6.670/16). The unregulated use of pesticides has provoked criticism from scientists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and some segments of government, especially technicians from the environmental and public health areas.

Indiscriminate pesticide release aggravates the Brazilian environmental crisis as many of those products were already prohibited in other countries due to proven negative effects on human and environmental health (Coelho et al., 2019). This is accompanied by the dismantling of environmental policies and protection of conservation areas, reduction in research investments, and popular participation in several environmental committees, as well as the weakening of monitoring (Thomaz et al., 2020). Differences among regions regarding use demonstrate a lack of integration of policies to protect pollinators at different scales (from federal to municipal) that can further worsen human, economic, and environmental health.

Brazilian scientists are producing valuable documents, working in national and international initiatives, such as "The São Paulo Declaration on Pollinators", Convention on Biological Diversity – CBD, FAO, Brazilian Initiative on Pollinators (IBP), and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (e.g. Dias et al., 1999; Díaz et al., 2015; IPBES, 2016; Wolowski et al., 2019). From an academic point of view, scientists are producing high-quality science to provide information for legislative standards. Nevertheless, although Brazil has more than double the number of pollinator-related laws as the U.S.A. (Hall and Steiner, 2019) both countries have similar flaws in legislation regarding pollinators. Our analyses make clear the need for a new specific policy at the national level to protect pollinators.

There are no specific laws for the maintenance of pollinators, though they have been minimally protected due to laws on other matters that indirectly benefit them. The inclusion of scientists at the executive level is necessary to change this reality (Azevedo-Santos et al., 2017) at the same time that environmental issues require transdisciplinary solutions through scientific research and scientific communication with civil-society actors, decision-makers, and stakeholders (Callisto et al., 2019). It is of huge concern that other pollinators (non-bees) are simply being ignored in Brazilian legislation relating to pollinators. The absence of protective measures related to other groups of pollinators, such as birds, bats, mammals, reptiles and other insects, further aggravates environmental problems since it fails to demonstrate the need for preservation. If we want to protect pollinators, we must also have laws at different levels on non-bee pollinators, and fund more scientific studies of them.

We urge the creation of specific legislation related to integrated pest management, GM crop risks, and especially on long-term monitoring of pollinators and pollination (Dicks et al., 2016). Brazilian scientists should also be consulted more and participate in proposals for laws relating to pollination. This requires better organization and integration of the legislative and academic-research sectors.

We also need to investigate more deeply some of the points found in this study, such as why the most biodiverse biomes, such as the Amazon are the most neglected. Brazilian pollination policies seem to reflect Brazilian agriculture in which pollinators are seen as products for the profitability of honey and/or for the application and regulation of pesticides.

We must restrict the release of new pesticides before we lose the pollinators we depend on. The release of new pesticides to the market should be conditioned on more effective policies to protect pollinators at different scales (from federal to municipal) and should include the requirement to have their effects fully understood and analyzed by institutions without conflicts of interest, such as universities and research institutions. For this, we must have proper funding and investments to enable such research in those institutions.

A more sustainable and biodiverse vision of protecting biomes is needed in our legislation. This perspective should also include raising awareness of multiple actors (society, farmers, legislators) for the need to increase natural or legally-protected areas to sustain yield (Imperatriz-Fonseca and Nunes-Silva, 2010). Despite its relevance and the fact that Brazil's environmental legislation requires that private properties retain a fixed proportion of native vegetation, this instrument has been systematically criticized by the agribusiness sector and its representatives in the Brazilian Congress (Metzger et al., 2019).

The other worrying point is related to the public perception of pollinators in urban areas. About half of the world population lives in urban environments (FAO, 2017), but in Brazil, the proportion is even greater, with about 84% of people living in towns and cities (IPBES, 2016). A model of separation from nature that is reflected in the countryside-city dichotomy, and with dissociation from nature by the public. From the scientific point of view, Brazilian pollinator-dependent crops in rural areas have been intensively investigated, demonstrating their importance for food security (Giannini et al., 2015b; Wolowski et al., 2019). In contrast, natural and/or urban environments have been neglected (but see Hipólito et al. (2019)).

Vegetation coverage in cities provides important services such as temperature regulation, protection and maintenance of rivers, mitigation of the impact of rain, pollution reduction, and promotion of people's well-being through the presence of recreational areas and contact with biodiversity. Thus, maintaining city biodiversity through its forests and pollinators in cities can have positive impacts both in the economic sphere (e.g. reduced energy consumption) and in the quality of life of residents (e.g. recreational activities). Cities with more green areas are healthier cities with a better quality of life. For this to happen, however, forests in cities must be environments in a good state of conservation to guarantee their ecosystem functions. That is, it is not enough to have forests, but ecological processes, such as pollination, need to be preserved so that we can enjoy their benefits. Legal support (specific legislation on biodiversity protection in cities environment) is crucial to those actions.