Before participating in a meeting at the Ministry of Agriculture, environmental NGOs set a red line.
During the revision of the Ecophyto plan announced by Gabriel Attal and requested by farmers, there is, for them, no question of removing the main indicator for measuring the use of pesticides in France.
“To call into question the Nodu indicator”, the reference tool of the Ecophyto plan, “is to call into question the very objective of reducing the use of pesticides”, affirmed eight environmental NGOs including Générations Futures, WWF France, the Foundation for Nature and Man or the LPO.
And added: “The Nodu must remain the reference and monitoring indicator of the plan”.
“Our organizations cannot condone either this denial of democracy, nor this 15-year flashback, sweeping away in a few days months and even years of collective work where many stakeholders worked for the success of the plan,” continue the NGOs.
The Ecophyto plan suspended by Attal
This Monday afternoon, these NGOs must participate at the Ministry of Agriculture in a Strategic Orientation and Monitoring Committee (Cos) with the government, elected officials and representatives of farmers, industry, on the future from Ecophyto.
This plan, which aims to halve the use of pesticides by 2030 (compared to 2015-2017).
It was suspended by Gabriel Attal, “time to put in place a new indicator” which would replace Nodu, the main French measuring tool.
The Nodu, expressed in hectares, takes into account the quantities of active substances sold and their reference dose - or “unit dose” - specific to each substance.
It evaluates “our dependence on pesticides, avoiding biases linked to large differences in approved doses between molecules”, explains the Inrae Research Institute on its site.
The FNSEA and the chemical industry strongly contest this.
They criticize this indicator for not reflecting the efforts of farmers, who claim to have already reduced their use of pesticides by 46% in 20 years.
The NGOs will hold a press conference around 4 p.m. following this meeting.