Hundreds of tractors driving from the Porte de Versailles to the area around the Eiffel Tower in Paris. This Wednesday, February 8, several thousand farmers demonstrated in the streets of Paris to protest against the ban on neonicotinoids, a family of insecticides qualified as “bee killers”, used in the cultivation of sugar beets.
On January 23, the Minister of Agriculture announced that these products would not be reauthorized in France. It responded to a judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union which considered that “Member States cannot derogate from the prohibitions” in the case of seeds treated with neonicotinoids.
These substances have in theory been banned in the European Union (EU) since 2018, but they had been authorized in France for a period of three years in a law of December 2020. This law also made it possible to authorize, until the 1st July 2023, use limited to a maximum period of one hundred and twenty days per year.
The main advocates of these products are the users: the farmers growing sugar beets. In this sector, France plays a major role. 23,700 beet growers allow France to rank as the leading European producer of beet sugar and the second in the world, behind Russia.
According to these farmers, there is therefore a major challenge in continuing to use this insecticide because it allows, by being applied preventively to beet seeds, to protect them from jaundice, propagated by aphids. In 2020, a large part of the plantations had been ravaged by this disease, resulting in a third of the harvest being destroyed and 280 million euros in losses.
For the farmers of the General Confederation of Beet Growers (CGB), there is “no alternative” at present to prevent this destructive disease. For the CGB president, Franck Sander, there is also no risk of this pesticide for pollinators, such as bees, because “beets do not flower”. Finally, for the FNSEA, it is “food sovereignty”, “displayed as a government priority”, which is at stake. The union calls on the executive to “move from speech to action”.
The main argument is that of the impact of these pesticides on insects, and even more generally on the environment. The impact on bees is particularly significant. Studies have shown that bee populations have decreased, the chemical affecting their immune system, and disrupting their growth, as well as their reproduction.
It is the whole environmental balance that could be disturbed by the use of neonicotinoids, denounce their detractors. In an interview at France Info, François Veillerette, spokesperson for the Générations Futures environmental defense association, estimated that in some places losses of 50% to 70% of the presence of insects had been observed, which “has an impact on the birds”. For Philippe Grandcolas, CNRS researcher at the Ecology and Environment Institute, “the poisoning of pollinators does not only occur via treated beets, so it does not matter that they do not flower! But also via other plants contaminated by polluted soils for several years”.
Finally, for those opponents of neonicotinoids, alternative solutions exist. In 2021, the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety had identified 22 alternatives, including the use of paraffin oil, to lower the level of aphid populations, and the use of two synthetic pesticides that can be sprayed.
