The Ecophyto plan will be reviewed within three weeks, promised the Minister of Ecological Transition Christophe Béchu.
Supposed to initiate a gradual reduction in pesticides, the government announced its suspension of this plan on Thursday.
Associations and elected officials have expressed concern about an ecological decline.
“We did not announce that we were authorizing a molecule, or that we were going to modify the rules on the proximity of local residents and on the catchment areas which allow the supply of drinking water,” he said. put into perspective in an interview with the newspaper La Tribune Dimanche, ensuring despite everything that he understood the “concern”.
“Health and the protection of biodiversity are red lines,” he recalled.
Also read Agricultural crisis: has the executive thrown ecology into oblivion?
Gabriel Attal announced Thursday the pausing of the program supposed to halve the use of pesticides by 2030 (compared to 2015-2017).
“We simply said that we needed three weeks – until the Agricultural Show – to re-discuss the tools that will be deployed this year”, summarized Christophe Béchu, rather discreet throughout the crisis which shook the world agriculture over the past two weeks.
Not “a questioning of our principles”
On Wednesday, the day before Gabriel Attal's announcements, he reaffirmed that there could be no "pretext to go back on the ecological transition", during his wishes to those involved in ecology.
The Minister of Ecological Transition also wishes to use these three weeks to “specify the use of the additional 250 million euros” devoted to the protection of nature and water in 2024 in order to reduce the use of pesticides.
And he considered it unsatisfactory that France uses an indicator for measuring pesticide use (called Nodu) that is different from a European indicator: “So giving ourselves a few weeks to discuss the European indicator, that does not seem to us absolutely not be a questioning of our principles,” said Christophe Béchu.
The major French cereal producers are in fact very opposed to the French indicator which, they say, does not reflect the drop in consumption of active substances in the fields.
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France calls for a “European health and agricultural control force”
On the European Green Deal, Christophe Béchu called for “finding the pace that is compatible with these ambitions”.
“When you ban pesticides in France, and you allow products to arrive from abroad using these same pesticides on the shelves of our supermarkets, where is the consistency, ecological and health, for biodiversity?
», questioned the minister.