Every morning, Nicolas Beytout analyzes political news and gives us his opinion.
This Friday, he tells us the fable of the beetroot and the ecologists.
The government has just presented a bill that allows the reintroduction of the neonicotinoid insecticide to support beet cultivation after having previously banned it for ecological reasons.
This Friday morning, Nicolas Beytout tells us a fable.
A fable whose title is: the beet and the green.
Once upon a time, there were ecologists who, all in their fair fight to save bees, had decided to ban the use of pesticides forever.
In particular, the use of a product with an unpronounceable name: neonicotinoids.
A law was proposed because the ecologists are influential and the bees are in their camp.
And what had to happen happened, neonicotinoids were banned.
When spring came, the green peach aphid was very happy, no more insecticide in front of it.
Finally free to eat as he pleases, he devoured the beet fields until one in two disappeared.
A few seasons were enough, the industry was on its knees.
You had to react or perish.
The government has just introduced a bill that allows the reintroduction of the neonicotinoid insecticide.
And to try to rebuild an entire section of our agriculture because there was danger in the remains.
45,000 jobs are threatened and our food sovereignty in danger.
No more beet sugar, soaring imports.
A desaster.
Once again, the government stepped in.
Except that die-hard ecologists don't understand it that way.
This exception for beet seems to them to announce other lifting of prohibitions.
We castigate the government's setbacks, we announce other threats to the environment.
The revolt is brewing, the battle has only just begun.
The green peach aphid keeps allies.
What this fable says is that France is falling for everything.
Where our European neighbors have shown pragmatism and adapted their legislation from the start, we have acted in dogmatism and absolutely banned all neonicotinoids.
Where we were a great food power, we endangered a key link in our agriculture.
And this government, which hopes to create 160,000 jobs with a 100 billion plan, was faced with the risk of letting 45,000 disappear in the territories.
It is abysmal.
We can see it: it is a great danger that agriculture and ecology have become enemies.
Morality?
Pompili one day, is not always Pompili ...
It was Barbara Pompili, when she was Secretary of State for Biodiversity in 2016, who defended the law of total ban on neonicotinoids.
And it is the same, who became Minister of Ecological Transition, who finds herself obliged today to withdraw.
This inconstancy is one of the French characteristics, with an immutable cycle: being green but doing too much;
to be weakened and to retreat.
Provided that this fable serves as a lesson and in particular provided that everything that emerges from the Citizen's Convention on the climate does not lead, in the end, to so many devastating dogmas.