The government wants to coordinate the action of France with that of the European Union and promote the search for alternatives.
by Laurence Girard
In 2020, Elisabeth Borne crossed the aisles of the Agricultural Show as Minister of Ecological Transition. Three years later, it was as a head of the government, which she wandered on Monday, February 27, Porte de Versailles, in Paris, in the largest farm in France. Two days earlier, Emmanuel Macron, inaugurating the show, had given him the mission of revealing the main lines of a plan aimed at reassuring farmers on the use of pesticides. With the guideline to coordinate the action of France with that of the European Union.
“Why ask our farmers for efforts that the neighbors don’t have to make? We recently had decisions that fell too brutally, we put farmers in front of Oukases, without solution,” declared the President of the Republic. For the Elysée, “this is the first time that we want to put farmers at the heart” of the decision, while the previous plans to reduce agricultural pesticides, known as Ecophyto, were mainly carried by environmental “motivations” and sanitary facilities.
The first government plan, Ecophyto 1, launched in 2008, aimed at a 50 %decrease, in ten years, of the use of synthetic pesticides. Faced with the difficulty of following this trajectory, Ecophyto 2 took over in 2015 posting, this time, the objective, at 2025. The manufacturers of phytosanitary products, gathered within Phyteis, believe that the volumes marketed in France have decreed almost 30 % between 2008 and 2021.
However, in 2021, they rebounded by 8 %. They still had to progress in 2022. Phyteis, which brings together industrialists like Bayer, Basf or Syngenta, has not yet published them. But the total turnover of its members has increased by 30 %, reaching 2.5 billion euros. The rise in prices does not alone explain this leap.
respecting the European framework
For the new plan, the State does not set a objective of reducing pesticide use. “This new Ecophyto 2030 plan will be built with all the actors involved, at the forefront of which the farmers. Its means will be increased,” said M terminal, without specifying the amounts. She called her ministers of agriculture (Marc Fesneau), the ecological transition (Christophe Béchu) and research (Sylvie Retailleau) to “present a new national strategy” on phytosanitary products “by summer” .
respecting the European framework and only the European framework. “We will not create any regulatory distortion for our producers, except in case of force majeure, when public health is threatened,” she added, stressing: “nobody here wants to repeat the errors of the chlordecone”, in Reference to toxic pesticide, prohibited in the United States in 1975, but used until 1993 in the Bananeraies of Guadeloupe and Martinique and at the origin of many cancers.
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