Agricultural crisis: the “pause” of the pesticide reduction plan dismays environmental NGOs

Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: XOSE BOUZAS / HANS LUCAS / HANS LUCAS VIA AFP 4:58 p.m., February 1, 2024

"Major setback", "15 years of failure", "purely political decision": dismay dominates Thursday among environmental NGOs after the government's announcement of a "pause" of the Ecophyto plan to reduce use pesticides, which an angry part of the agricultural world was demanding. “Générations Futures denounces these totally retrograde measures taking us back more than 15 years,” declared its spokesperson François Veillerette in a press release.

“This is a major political error because if the question of agricultural income is a real question for a certain number of farmers, it is not by sacrificing the environment and natural resources that we will resolve this problem , quite the contrary,” he added. “Today the FNSEA has won, but it will not bring anything to agricultural income, not a cent” and “it will allow us to continue the agriculture of the previous century by keeping ever more dangerous products on the market and by delaying their withdrawal in a cynical manner,” he told AFP.

“A purely political decision”

This "pause" was announced by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, "time to put in place a new indicator" to replace the current one, the "Nodu", which measures the use of molecules by operators, contested by agricultural organizations. This implementation must be done in consultation with NGOs. “We will reject any participation in a new Ecophyto dynamic whose indicator would be biased and would give a truncated vision of the dependence of French agriculture on pesticides,” adds Générations Futures. This “pause” is announced while the State has until June 30, 2024 to better respect its trajectories of reducing the use of pesticides and protect waters, by order of administrative justice.

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“This announcement is therefore also a refusal to comply with a court decision,” the NGO Pollinis, one of five associations (along with Notre Affaire à tous, the National Association for the Protection of Water and rivers, Biodiversity under our feet and ASPAS) at the origin of this legal procedure. This pause "is a purely political decision, which goes against science and the law and which will not solve the problems of farmers", estimated Pollinis, recalling that "the collapse of biodiversity knows no solution. break".

“All of this makes no sense,” laments Sandrine Bélier, director of the NGO Humanity and Biodiversity, contacted by AFP. “Certainly it is better to suspend than to have a cheap strategy, but Ecophyto is the main plan which supports farmers in their economic transition”, via the financing of research and experiments. “Challenging this mechanism means giving up supporting farmers in their ecological transitions,” she warns.