France has announced it is to end a special dispensation given to its sugar beet producers which allowed them to use a family of insecticides nicknamed “bee killers” despite a European Union-wide ban on their use since 2018.
The move followed a ruling last Thursday by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the EU’s supreme court, in a case brought by environmentalist associations and a beekeeper who challenged a similar dispensation allowed by Belgium.
The ECJ ruling definitively outlaws any EU member state from applying a loophole in the laws of the bloc which allowed “emergency” exemptions from the ban.
Until the ECJ ruling, the French government had been planning to this year extend the dispensation for sugar beet producers, granted by decree. It was to be approved at a meeting of an advisory “monitoring council” on the use of the insecticides which was originally planned for last Friday. That was postponed to next Thursday, but agriculture minister Marc Fesneau announced on Monday that, in the light of the ECJ ruling, the idea of any further exemption was now “terminated”.
The 2018 EU ban of several pesticides and herbicides included the outdoor use of clothianidin, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam, which are neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides chemically similar to nicotine. While used by beet producers and others against aphids, they have been linked to a collateral collapse of colonies of honey bees and other pollinators, and also some bird populations. Neonicotinoids attack the central nervous system of insects, causing paralysis and death, and are slow to degrade in the environment.
France is Europe’s biggest sugar beet producer by volume, with a surface area of crops of more than 400,000 hectares, and the second-biggest worldwide, after Russia. In 2020, the French parliament approved legislation which gave an exemption, only to sugar beet farmers, to use neonicotinoids to contain “beet yellow virus”, which is spread by aphids. The insecticides are used by French beet farmers to coat plant seeds, and they continue to be active as the plants grow.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
French agriculture minister Marc Fesneau, who in December suggested that the exemption would be renewed, said that in light of the “sufficiently powerful” ECJ ruling, any further dispensation was “terminated”.
“I have agreed with representatives of the sector that we will put in place measures that will allow to cover the risk of losses linked to the yellow virus for the time until we find the needed [pest control] alternatives,” he added.
Franck Sander, president of France’s Beet Planters’ General Confederation, the CGB, which has around 26,000 members, warned of potential “catastrophic” consequences. “There will be a fall in the [production] surface, and an abandon of planters,” he said. “If it’s a year of low pressure [from beet yellow virus] we’ll know how to manage, but if it’s like 2020, when we lost a third of the harvest, it will be catastrophic.”
The now outlawed dispensations were a loophole in EU law which allowed member countries to grant farmers “emergency” short-term exemptions from the neonicotinoids ban, and limited to a period of 120 days per year, when no alternative control of pests harmful to their crops was available. But what were supposed to be short-term dispensations had in reality become regularly renewed by a number of countries across the bloc. The ECJ ruling means that the ban is now absolute, even if crop yield is threatened by disease.
In its conclusions published on January 19th, the ECJ said EU member states are not permitted “to authorise the placing on the market of plant protection products for seed treatment, or the placing on the market and use of seeds treated with those products, where the placing on the market and use of seeds treated with those products have been expressly prohibited by an implementing regulation”.
Scientific evidence suggests that neonicotinoids attack the immune and reproductive systems of bees and other pollinators. In 2019, one year before France reintroduced the use of neonicotinoids, a joint report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization noted: “The use of systemic insecticides from the group of neonicotinoids negatively affect pollinator reproductive potential and it has been linked, together with other interacting factors, to global declines in honey bees and wild bees, thus reducing their function as pollinators”.
A study of EU Commission data, published by the organisation Pesticide Action Network, which represents European NGOs campaigning for sustainable alternatives to chemical pesticides, found that between 2019 and 2022, a total of 236 exemptions from the 2018 EU list of banned pesticides and herbicides were granted, and that almost half of these had concerned the use of neonicotinoids.
At a general assembly meeting on December 8th of the beet planters’ confederation, the CGB, French agriculture minister appeared in a video presentation in which he declared: “A third [exemption decree] is to come, in any case I hope so, and I think it will be useful […] to effectively fight against the [beet] yellowing, while waiting for alternative solutions.”
Finding alternatives to neonicotinoids was the subject of a 2021 study by France’s Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) which identified 22 potentially less dangerous alternatives for preventing beet yellow virus, and it is also one of the briefs of the “neonicotinoids monitoring council”, set up after the use of neonicotinoids for sugar beet crops was re-authorised in France in December 2020. But environmental groups complain that little, if any, progress has been made on the subject.
The “neonicotinoids monitoring council” is made up of Members of Parliament, civil servants, representatives from farmers’ unions, environmentalist associations, and the apiarian sector, as well as members of the Beet Planters’ General Confederation and two other professional associations from the sugar beet and sugar industry. But the tensions between the groups of opposing interests have spilled over, with accusations that it was dominated by the interests of beet producers and the refining industry.
Even before the announcement on Monday that the government was forced to end the exemption, the environmentalist association Agir pour l’environnement, together with the left-leaning small farmers’ union, the Confédération paysanne, announced last week that they had resigned from the council, which will now be tasked with advising on the consequences of the ECJ ruling.
“This monitoring council is a masquerade,” said agronomist Jacques Caplat, secretary general of Agir pour l’environnement. “We are not listened to, neither about research programmes nor about alternative methods. In fact, we have no role, we are just a token presence.”
Also last week, the Ligue de protection des oiseaux (LPO), a bird protection association, and Générations futures, another environmental protection organisation, said they would boycott the council’s next meeting, now programmed for Thursday.
“In reality it’s the ITB [an agronomic research body founded by sugar beet producers and industrial refiners] that steers this council, while leading research and experimentation itself and putting out tenders,” added Caplat. “It’s not neutral.”
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- This article is based on a report originally published in French, which can be found here.
English version, with added reporting, by Graham Tearse.