Despite the controversy, Marc Fesneau does not intend to bend. In a column published on his Twitter account on Saturday, the Minister of Agriculture persists in his desire to reconsider the procedure for banning the herbicide S-metolachlor. He assumes his choice in the name of “food sovereignty”.
The Minister calls for “properly posing the debate” and “changing the method to move forward”, regretting being exposed to “caricature”, “as if the greatest challenge of our time, the fight against climate change and the essential ecological transition, could only be conceived as a pitched battle”.
Recalling that Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne announced a “strategic action plan to anticipate the withdrawal of potentially problematic active substances” which should reconcile food sovereignty and ecological transition, he considers that this planning must “not introduce a distortion of competition with our European neighbours.
Drinking water risks
Thursday, before the congress of the majority agricultural union, the FNSEA, the minister announced that he had asked the French Health Security Agency (Anses) to reverse its desire to ban the main uses of S-metolachlor. ANSES, mandated to assess and authorize or not pesticides, announced on February 15 that it was initiating a withdrawal procedure concerning this agricultural herbicide widely used in France on corn, soybeans and sunflowers, and whose chemical derivatives have been detected. above the permitted limits in groundwater – and therefore potentially in drinking water. “I will not be the minister who will abandon strategic decisions for our food sovereignty at the sole discretion of an agency”, had launched Marc Fesneau.
The NGO Générations Futures immediately denounced a “scandal in terms of protecting public health and the environment” while the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified this herbicide as a “suspected carcinogenic substance” last June. . Several elected socialists and environmentalists have deplored an attack on the independence of ANSES. MEP (Renaissance) Pascal Canfin, quoted by The worldpointed out that the science was “now very clear about this herbicide” and that the priority was “to work on alternatives for farmers, not to fight the battles of the past”.
The problem of the gap with the EU
In his text, Marc Fesneau assures that ANSES’s expertise or role “have never been called into question” and justifies its position by “the necessary synchronization and consistency” with the European calendar, without commenting on the health risks associated with this herbicide. In addition, in a letter to ANSES which he also made public on Twitter, the Minister explains that a ban decision from the European Commission may not take place before November 2024, i.e. “up to two years after the end of use at the French level”, judging such a discrepancy “hard to understand”.