Paris, Feb 2 (EFE).- The French government’s suspension of a key green policy to reduce the use of pesticides, announced as part of a package of measures to appease protests by the agricultural sector, has provoked harsh criticism from environmental organizations.
French farmers have been protesting for two weeks against what they say is an excessive burden of regulations, including a proposal to reduce the use of pesticides by 50% by 2030, known as the Ecophyto plan.
On Thursday, the French Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau, announced that the Ecophyto plan would be “paused” in order to “revise” and “simplify” “a certain number” of “aspects.”
“There is no pause in the collapse of biodiversity, and science clearly shows that we must drastically reduce the use and toxicity of pesticides,” sources from the Pollinis organization, which forms the Justice for the Living group with four other NGOs, told EFE on Friday.
“Taken together, these announcements do not address the problems of farmers and go against what needs to be done to stop the collapse of life. Agriculture and ecology are not incompatible,” Pollinis stressed.
In addition, the government announced that France will not ban any pesticide before the active ingredient has been banned at European level, whereas until now the French health agency Anses had exercised this competence without waiting for community regulations.
These are “totally retrograde measures that take us back 15 years”, denounced the association Future Generations in a press release.
“This is a serious political mistake, because while the issue of agricultural income is a real problem for many farmers, it is not by sacrificing the environment and natural resources that we will solve this problem, quite the opposite,” argued Future Generations, which announced that it would take legal action to ban any pesticide proven to be unsafe.
Another organization that has spoken out is the French branch of the World Wildlife Fund, which has assured that President Emmanuel Macron’s government is fighting the wrong battle.
“The announcement of a pause in the Ecophyto plan is a disastrous sign for the protection of the environment and public health,” said WWF France, as reported by the newspaper Le Monde.
On a political level, the concessions announced by the government on Thursday to appease rural discontent have not gone down well with the left-wing opposition and especially with ecologists.
“Supporting farmers can not be at the expense of public health,” lamented the deputy Julien Bayou on the social network X.
Bayou also criticized the fact that Macron’s 2022 slogan, which promised that his second mandate would be “ecological or it won’t be,” had become “Make pesticides great again,” in reference to Donald Trump’s famous slogan.
But the ecologist’s complaints are not limited to the measures announced in Paris, as farmers’ protests spread to other European countries, such as Belgium, Germany and Spain, in an attempt to obtain European Union-wide concessions.
Organizations such as Greenpeace have criticized some of the promises made by Brussels, such as the moratorium on the obligation to fallow land to prevent soil erosion. EFE
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