The European Union Commission’s Appeal Committee on Monday gave the go-ahead to extend the licence for sales of herbicide glyphosate for a further five years after its current authorization runs out on December 15th, causing dismay for environmental campaigners and delight in the agrochemical lobby.
The controversial decision was reached after 18 of the 28 EU member states voted in favour, nine against and one abstained. Glyphosate is a compound that was introduced by US agrochemical giant Monsanto in 1974 and widely marketed in its weedkiller Roundup, which has multi-billion-dollar yearly sales, but after the firm’s patent ran out in 2000 it is also now used widely in products from other brands, and employed massively by farmers across Europe and elsewhere in the world.
Several scientific studies have found evidence that glyphosate may be carcinogenic, a claim dismissed by the agrochemical industry, while other research has thrown doubt on those findings. Environmental organisations underline that on top of health concerns, the non-selective herbicide, widely employed in agriculture, kills off plants which are vital for the wider eco-system.
A 2015 study by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reported that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans” and that there was “sufficient evidence” that it causes cancer in animals, while the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) found that it was unlikely to cause cancer, and the European Chemicals Agency in March this year said there was no evidence it was carcinogenic to humans “based on the information available”.
However, in September, British daily The Guardian revealed that the EFSA report, whose recommendation that glyphosate did not represent a danger to public health was a crucial factor in the EC Appeal Committee decision on Monday, contained numerous pages that had been copy-pasted from a Monsanto report submitted to EFSA by the agrochemical industry’s lobbying body, the “Glyphosate Task Force”.
The IARC’s 2015 report found “limited evidence” that glyphosate was responsible for causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma, mostly based on international studies of exposure to agricultural workers. In France, numerous cases of farmers who claim to have contracted cancer from their exposure to glyphosate have been highlighted in the media (such as in this video, in French).
France had voted against the proposal to extend the licence of the compound for another five years, and following the vote on Monday President Emmanuel Macron announced his government would unilaterally implement a limited three-year extension.
There is growing concern in the country over the use of agrochemicals, resulting in measures such as a ban introduced in January this year on the use of certain chemical products in land maintenance by local authorities and public establishments. France has the largest agricultural production in Europe in terms of sales value, and the largest surface area of utilised farming land. In parallel it is also a massive user of agrochemical products, more than any other European country. In 2016, sales in France of products categorized as “phytosanitary” reached 68,000 tonnes, which was 4,000 tonnes more than in 2009.
Online French regional news journal Mediacités, with which Mediapart is a partner in a series of editorial exchanges, reports here, illustrated with maps, about the extent of the use in France of agrochemical products, focusing on the use, region by region, of the top five most dangerous substances for human health and the environment.
Mediacités obtained the figures reported here from BNV-d, the public body created in 2009 that collects data from distributors of agrochemical products in France, information which remained confidential until this summer (see page 3).
The data provides several pictures of practices in rural France. One is of regions with a predominance of cattle farming and diverse crop production, notably in central France, where sales figures suggest pesticides are the least employed. Another is of those regions with large-scale crop production, notably cereals, like the farmlands surrounding Paris, and also the Aquitaine region and in northern France, where there is abundant use of agrochemicals. A third is that of wine-growing regions and those centred on fruit and vegetable crops, which notably include the south-west region around Bordeaux (le Bordelais), the Mediterranean basin, and the Champagne and Loire regions, where sales data also suggests large-scale use of specific types of agrochemicals.
By département (the administrative regions equivalent to a county) it is the Marne, in north-east France, which records the biggest sales by volume of pesticides – and which represent 321% more than the national average. That is followed by the Gironde (316 %) in south-west France, the Aube (291 %) in the north-east, the Vaucluse (210 %) in the south and the Somme (189 %), in the north. Naturally, there is a disproportion caused by the geographical size of the départements, or the economic fabric of the smaller, densely populated urban ones around Paris, or those in mountainous regions.
“The very definition of a pesticide is that it is harmful for a living organism,” noted, succinctly, a 2012 report by the French Senate, published as part of a fact-finding commission on the wider effects of the use of pesticides (and which was prompted by cases of serious illnesses among farmers believed to have been caused by their use). Whether it is used against a fungus or a particular insect, pesticides have consequences beyond their original target. As Christian Pacteau of the French League for the Protection of Birds in the Vendée region of western France puts it, “A poison is a poison, it acts on the whole of the food chain”. The results of a scientific study in Germany published in October showed that 75% of the populations of flying insects have disappeared over the past 27 years in protected environments in the country, and the authors of the study concluded that global warming could not be the cause, but that, "Pesticide usage, year-round tillage, increased use of fertilizers and frequency of agronomic measures... may form a plausible cause”.
Behind the terms “pesticides”, “agrochemicals” and products that are “phytosanitary” is a very wide range of substances with often obscure names and which vary greatly in the dangers they represent for the environment, humans and animals. For that reason, Mediacités chose to focus on close to 40 products from the 597 that figure in the BNV-d sales data, choosing them on the basis of their harmful effects as recorded by international scientific institutions. When, such as in the case of glyphosate, those institutions disagree on the danger of a product, it is included if at least one scientific study found it to represent a health hazard.
The chemical that hides the forest
Among the most dangerous agrochemical products, glyphosate is by far the best-selling molecule. Worldwide, its use in agriculture grew, by volume, almost 15-fold between 1995 and 2014. But it is not the only one to have met with booming commercial success. Chlorothalonil, a fungicide widely used on fruit and vegetable crops and classified by the IARC as a “possible” carcinogen, is among the fastest growing sales, as is also the herbicide pendimethaline, classified as a possible carcinogen by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
On the other hand, sales of a Bayer fungicide containing folpet (called folpel in France, where it is one of the most-used pesticides), and which was also classified as a possible carcinogen by the US Environmental Protection Agency, have fallen significantly. But decreasing sales of one particular poisonous substance can be misleading, as in the case of metam sodium, used as a herbicide, fungicide and soil fumigant, which is being replaced by other chemicals which are considered by environmentalists to be potentially just as dangerous. “A whole load of toxic molecules have been banned since the 1970s, but each year there are around one hundred others that are authorised to be marketed,” commented French agronomist Carmen Etcheverry from environmentalist organisation France Nature Environnement, speaking in an interview last month with daily Libération.
The failure of policies in France to reduce the use of agrochemicals
In 2008 the French government launched an “Ecophyto” programme aimed at reducing by half the volume of pesticides used in the country by 2018. The figures collected by Mediacités show that, instead, agrochemical sales have climbed by 6% in volume between 2009 and 2016. The trend is also detailed in a report on progress of the Ecophyto programme published by the French Ministry of Agriculture in 2015 (available, in French, here).
As one source at the French environment ministry, whose identity is withheld here, put it, “France could not move in ten years from the status of fourth-largest market worldwide for phytosanitary products to that of an agricultural land that had got rid of its chemical crutches. The target of 50% was above all PR”.
It should be noted that the tonnage of agrochemical products used in France is, to a degree, proportionate to its 30 million hectares of utilised agricultural land, which represents 15% of that in the whole of the EU. But as a 2013 report (available here, in French) on data for the period 2008-2011by the French National Office for Water and Aquatic Zones noted, “the French consumption of phytosanitary products by hectare of agricultural land remains relatively high in relation to other European countries”. For despite the high-profile campaigns of environmentalists and the parallel gradual increase in public awareness of the dangers of immoderate use of agrochemicals, their application over the longer period of 2000-2016 has remained largely stable (3.6 kilos per hectare of utilised agricultural land in 2000, and a corresponding 3.6 kilos in 2016), according to the data collected by Mediacités. Meanwhile, the Ecophyto target of reducing by half their use by 2018 has been put back to 2025.
How the BNV-d data bank became publicly accessible
Laurent Coudercy is head of the statistics department of the French Agency for Biodiversity, a body managed by the French environment ministry, based in the town of Orléans. “I began to have enough of answering 'no',” he says of the numerous requests made to him by environmentalists, local authorities, water companies and businesses for access to the BNV-d data base, which he describes as the “best tool we have for evaluating the use of phytosanitary products in France”.
Surprisingly, the same request from Mediacités was the first he had received from the media. Mediacités spent four months trying to obtain access to the BNV-d information, during which it sent around 20 emails and made numerous phone calls to the ministry before finally entering into contact with Coudercy, in September.
Fortunately for Mediacités, which otherwise would have been refused access, the state-run commission responsible for public access to administrative documents, the CADA, had on July 6th ruled against the argument from the agrochemical business and its lobby that the BNV-d data fell under “professional and commercial secrecy” and which had until then ensured it was confidential. The CADA, primarily in order to help local authorities apply financial penalties to those causing environmental pollution, unlocked all of the information the BNV-d contained, which goes back to the year 2008, in the name of the public interest.
The CADA was then approached by Étienne Dervieux, a retired environmental militant based in the town of Vannes in Brittany, north-west France, and member of the association Eaux et Rivières (Water and Streams). In 2006, the Breton branch of the association successfully brought legal action against Monsanto and the company that marketed Roundup in France for advertising that was misleading (the packaging of the product declared it “respected the environment” and was “100% biodegradable”), for which a court in Lyon fined the two 15,000 euros. Dervieux this summer filed a request with the CADA to access the BNV-d data. “We put in a request, it’s relatively easy, and there you are,” he says. He and his fellow activists then uploaded the data onto a dedicated website, data-Eau-France.
The information provided by the BNV-d details the nearly 500 agrochemical substances, including glyphosate, sold in each French département, their weight in kilos, and the identities of the distributors. But a degree of caution is needed: the information given to the BNV-d is declarative, and does not identify who buys the products nor how they are specifically used. It is not possible to know for certain how much of the products were used or how many that were placed in storage. Finally, the data concerns only sales in France, which obviously does not include the quantity of agrochemicals bought by users in border regions in France from retail points in other countries, such as Belgium, Germany, Switzerland or Italy.
But it remains the only indicator of its kind, what Laurent Coudercy describes as “the best tool”, with which to dress a portrait of the use of chemicals in French agriculture.
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- The French version of this report can be found here.