Several organizations have carried out a report to the High Authority for the transparency of public life on a potential breach of the manufacturers’ union to their ethical obligations.
by Stéphane Mandard
Did the pesticide lobby use a “false job blackmail” in an attempt to obtain the repeal of a legislative measure aimed at prohibiting the production of ultratoxic pesticides on French soil? The question is raised by four organizations: Transparency International, Foodwatch, the Veblen Institute and the Friends of the Earth. Tuesday, February 21, they made a report to the High Authority for the Transparency of Public Life (HATVP) and to the Ethics Committees of the National Assembly and the Senate on a possible breach of the French professional union of pesticide manufacturers, Phyteis (ex-chart).
Like parliamentarians, lobbyists are subject to ethical obligations. Article 18-5 of the law relating to the transparency of public life thus provides that representatives of interest must “refrain from obtaining or trying to obtain information or decisions by deliberately communicating [to parliamentarians ] erroneous information or using maneuvers intended to deceive it “. In other words, they do not have the right to deliberately lie to their “targets” to “manipulate” them in order to obtain votes favorable to the interests they defend.
For associations at the origin of the report, this is what the UIPP did in 2019 to oppose an article in the Agriculture and Food Act (EGALIM) of October 30 2018. His article 83 provides for the prohibition, from 2022, of production, on French soil, of pesticides banned from use in Europe, sometimes for more than ten years because of their danger to health and the Environment but that agrochemical giants continue to produce to export them mainly in developing countries. This commercial practice, which the United Nations describes as “odious”, reports hundreds of millions of euros each year to sector leaders, Bayer, Syngenta and Basf.
convince the government and the legislator
As MO12345lemonde revealed in January 2020, the UIPP then led intense lobbying, to the summit of the State, in order to obtain the repeal of this article. Main argument put forward to convince the government and the legislator to make back machine: employment. “The economic and social impact in France of this measure will be extremely important, with more than 2,700 jobs directly concerned over our nineteen production sites spread across the whole territory”, warn the signatories – whose bosses of entities French of Bayer, Syngenta and Basf – a letter sent to the Prime Minister, a few days after the promulgation of the law.
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