Emmanuelle Ducros 8:53 a.m., February 7, 2024
Every morning after the 8:30 a.m. news, Emmanuelle Ducros reveals to listeners her “Journey into absurdity”, from Monday to Thursday.
In the midst of the European agricultural crisis, Commission President Ursula Von der Layen made a shocking statement yesterday in front of Parliament in Strasbourg. She wants to scrap the plan to halve the use of pesticides in the Union. Quite a step back.
The plan was to halve the volumes of phytosanitary products by 2030 compared to the period 2015-2017. But the European Parliament recently rejected the draft directive. The States are no longer very eager to support it. And for good reason, the strategy is so radical that it has thrown farmers onto the roads. Ursula Von der Leyen has been turning a deaf ear to warnings since 2019. Now that the tractors are in Brussels, she must come to grips with the obvious: the proposal “has become a symbol of polarization”. Reverse.
It's good news ?
It depends on how you see things. Reducing the use of pesticides must remain an essential objective for the European Union. There is no debate on this, it is vital. But the way the project was planned was inept.
Inept?
We decided on a reduction percentage of 50% on a corner of the table. I am not joking. It's a round figure, provided by a vague NGO, it is not based on anything. We did exactly the same thing as what France did when it decided in 2015 that it did not need more than 50% nuclear power in its electricity mix. A joke from the Hollande-Royal duo fed on the fantasies of Greenpeace. In both cases, there was no technical, scientific justification for this 50% figure. It's frightening. But that's the reality. Essential policies were decided on a whim.
It was a milestone. It had to be implemented.
Should have been. But in both cases, we were disinterested in the consequences, stewardship would follow. You speak. This has destroyed investment in nuclear power. We are still paying the consequences. We haven't finished paying them. Same thing for agriculture. Specialists warn of drops of 10% to 20% in production. There is no solution planned.
That's to say ?
For energy, we vaguely said that we would put wind turbines here. How much ? Mystery. For food, the same. Nobody asked what the production objectives should be to feed Europe and with what new technologies to achieve them. The Commission forgot one detail in its great environmental gesture: we eat three times a day. The only alternative is not called fasting, but imports.
You are pleading for another pesticide reduction plan.
Yes. And ambitious. But rational this time. With research programs. Money for genomics, robotization, biocontrol. Let's hope for a miracle. That the European Commission is realizing that agriculture is not a hobby but a vital necessity? And if it also puts its feet on the ground, puts things in the right direction and develops a strategy with reality and not in spite of reality, we will have made great progress.