More than 7,000 tonnes of “active substances” contained in pesticides outlawed in France were exported out of the country in 2023, according to an investigation for French public broadcaster France Télévisions.
A team of journalists from the environmental affairs programme Vert de Rage (Green with rage), working with Swiss NGO Public Eye, which holds Swiss companies to account over their operating practices, focused on two chemical plants operating in Normandy, northern France, one of them owned by Swiss firm Syngenta, the other by German group BASF. Chemicals they produce are banned from circulation in France, but a loophole in the law allows the chemicals to be sold abroad.
A total of 7,300 tonnes of pesticides which are banned from usage in France were exported from the country in 2023 (compared with 7,400 tonnes in 2022). The top five countries which last year imported the pesticides banned in France were, in order of tonnage, Brazil, followed by Ukraine, the United States, Russia and the UK.
Consequently, residue of certain of the pesticides banned in France returns to French tables through imported food, the programme found.
Included among the exported chemicals is thiamethoxam, part of the neonicotinoid class of insecticides, dubbed “bee killers” because of the mass fatalities they cause among honey bees. They have been banned from use in France (a ban temporarily lifted for beetroot growers) since 2018. Twenty-two tonnes of thiamethoxam manufactured at a Syngenta plant at Saint-Pierre-la-Garenne, lower Normandy, were among the 2023 exports, according to research by Public Eye.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Waste water flushed from the plant was found to contain 48% more of the neonicotinoid than the recommended ceiling amount for the water table in France. Samples were taken from just outside the plant, from a nearby lake which lies close to a waste dump once used by Syngenta, and in a well which descends into the water table. These, and other samples taken outside the BSF plant, were sent by Vert de Rage for analysis by the environmental toxicology analysis department at the CHU teaching hospital in Limoges, in west-central France.
The tests on the samples outside the Syngenta plant also found traces of two herbicides – atrazine and diuron – which have been banned from use in France since 2004 and 2003 respectively, along with traces of two fungicides – oxadixyl, banned from use in France since 2003, and cyproconazole, banned in 2023.
Contacted by Mediapart, Syngenta said in a written reply that its plant produced no thiamethoxam in 2023, but had produced the neonicotinoid up until 2022. “There was no shipment of thiamethoxam from the Saint-Pierre-la-Garenne site in 2023,” the company insisted, adding that the last shipment dated from May 2022”. It also said that its production of products containing oxadixyl ended “in the early 2000s”, and those containing cyproconazole ended “in 2020”. It added that atrazine and diuron had never been used in the conception of its products.
The investigation by Vert de rage and Public Eye also found that fipronil, an insecticide used on crops and banned for agricultural use in France since 2004 (although authorised in anti-parasitic products for pets), is among the exports from France.
Fipronil is produced at a plant at Saint-Aubin-lès-Elbeuf, also in Normandy, owned by German chemicals giant BASF and, according to Public Eye, 1,428 tonnes of the chemical were exported from there in 2023. Tests on samples taken by Vert de Rage of water waste from the plant found that they contained 0.259 microgrammes of fipronil per litre, which is 336 times more than the ceiling amount recommended by the environmental protection services.
Contacted by Mediapart, BASF did not comment on the results of the tests of the samples.
”Insecticides like thiamethoxam and fipronil have a phenomenal toxicity, particularly for bees, a crucial species in the food chain and for agricultural production,” commented Vincent Bretagnolle, a director of research with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and who has for many years studied the effects of insecticides upon ecosystems. “It is precisely for that reason that these products were banned.”
Neonicotinoids like thiamethoxam have the particularity of being very easily displaced by water, moving from one environment to another. “Recent data indicates that they prompt a collapse of [populations] of aquatic invertebrates,” added Bretagnolle, underlining the concern caused by the presence of thiamethoxam in both surface water and the water table.
“We didn’t expect such high levels at all,” said Mathilde Cusin, who co-directed the Vert de Rage documentary. “It’s common knowledge that France continues to export banned substances. But where are they produced, by who, in what quantities? That’s what we wanted to know.”
One of the questions that emerge from the revelations is how can such chemicals, amid so many rules and regulations in France concerning phytosanitary products, still be manufactured in the country? Much of the answer lies in legislation called “la loi Egalim” (Egalim law), which was approved by parliament in 2018 and promulgated on January 1st 2022. The wide-ranging legislation was concerned with commercial practices in the agricultural sector, and standards for food production, including animal welfare and environmental issues. Included in the latter was a ban placed on the exportation of phytosanitary products that contained outlawed substances. But it did not ban the export of the outlawed substances themselves, the raw materials, that were included in those products.
Whether or not that was the result of an oversight, or a deliberate move to serve the interests of the manufacturers of those banned substances, is unclear. It has above all benefited foreign companies like BASF and US firm Corteva.
“Last year, more than 4,500 tonnes of pesticides were exported thanks to that gap and the volumes using that crack in the legislation continue to rise,” said Laurent Gaberell, a researcher and campaigner on food and agriculture at Public Eye.
In a written response to questions submitted to it by Mediapart, BASF said: “Concerning the conditions of the Egalim law, which has prohibited the production, stockage and circulation in France of certain phyto-pharmaceutic products unauthorised in Europe […] this does not concern the active substances, nor the finished product other than the phyto-pharmaceutic products. Fipronil is an active substance and its production in France is therefore not regulated by the Egalim law.”
The absence of a blanket ban on the manufacture of both the now-outlawed products and, in isolation, the chemicals they include has disastrous consequences in France and the countries which the latter are exported to. For Souleiman El Balkhi, head of the environmental toxicology analysis department at the Limoges CHU hospital, the waste water samples taken from the Syngenta and BASF plants in Normandy are clearly “environmental pollution”.
While production of some of the harmful molecules has stopped, they remain present in eco-systems for years afterwards. Meanwhile, those still in production, exported around the world, can even return to French tables in the form of residue on imported food. Brazil, the largest importer from France of the banned pesticides, exports beef and soja to France in return, while Vert de Rage found residues of pesticides banned in France on imported fruit from China, Peru and Tunisia.
At the end of 2022, following Public Eye’s initial revelations about the gap in the legislation that allowed for the exports of pesticides, the then French minister for ecological transition (equivalent to environment minister elsewhere), Christophe Béchu, pledged to tighten up the legislation. “We have to correct, to amend, because the intention of the legislator was not to allow this gap,” he said. Two years on, it remains to be seen whether the newly appointed minister for ecological transition, energy, climate and risk prevention, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, will enact Béchu’s pledge.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse