ANSES announced in February that it was initiating a withdrawal procedure for S-metolachlor, an agricultural herbicide widely used in France, whose chemical derivatives were detected beyond the authorized limits.
Thursday, before the congress of the majority agricultural union, the FNSEA, the Minister of Agriculture announced that he had asked the French Agency for Health Security (Anses) to reconsider its desire to ban the main uses of S-metolachlor, a herbicide.
Heavily criticized after this announcement, he persists in a column published on Saturday on his Twitter accountassuming its choice in the name of “food sovereignty”.
Marc Fesneau calls for “posing the debate correctly” and “changing the method to move forward”, regretting being exposed to “caricature”, “as if the greatest challenge of our time, the fight against climate change and the essential ecological transition, could only be conceived as a pitched battle”.
Recalling that Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne announced a “strategic action plan to anticipate the withdrawal of potentially problematic active substances” which should reconcile food sovereignty and ecological transition, he considers that this planning must “not introduce a distortion of competition with our European neighbours”.
A “scandal in the protection of public health and the environment”
ANSES, mandated to assess and authorize pesticides or not, announced on February 15 to initiate a withdrawal procedure concerning this agricultural herbicide widely used in France on corn, soy and sunflower, and whose chemical derivatives have been detected beyond the authorized limits in groundwater – and therefore potentially in drinking water.
“I will not be the minister who will abandon strategic decisions for our food sovereignty at the sole discretion of an agency”, had launched Marc Fesneau.
The NGO Générations Futures immediately denounced a “scandal for the protection of public health and the environment” when the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified this herbicide as a “suspected carcinogen” last June. Several elected socialists and environmentalists also deplored an attack on the independence of ANSES.
In his text, Marc Fesneau assures that the expertise or the role of ANSES “have never been called into question” and justifies his position by “the necessary synchronization and consistency” with the European calendar, without commenting on the health risks associated with this herbicide.
In a letter to ANSES which he also made public on Twitter, the Minister explains that a ban decision from the European Commission may not take place before November 2024, i.e. “up to two years after the end of use at the French level”, judging such a discrepancy “hard to understand”.
