Is France sacrificing its sugar beet production sector, the largest in Europe?
By banning neonicotinoids in seed coatings and sprays in 2018, the French government placed its beet producers in an unprecedented restrictive situation.
After a 2020 harvest year ravaged by beet yellows (30% to 70% losses), the Minister of Agriculture had granted, in 2021 and 2022, an exemption for the use of the pesticide in seed coating .
But last January, the Court of Justice of the European Union put an end to the possibility of derogating from this ban.
French seed companies can no longer coat seeds with this pesticide suspected of killing bees.
The only remaining possibility in Europe is to spray acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid whose use has been extended until 2033 by the European Commission.
A practice that France has also banned since 2018.
French beet growers are therefore faced with a double threat.
That of seeing their production collapse, with beets two to three times smaller, in the event of yellows.
And that of competition from European neighbors whose production will unscrupulously replace French losses.
“Will we specify on packages of sweet products that the sugar comes from Germany or Poland?
And that it was produced by pulverizing the neonicotinoids that we are refused?”, asks Bruno Cardot.
This beet producer from Aisne, present at the demonstration in Paris this Wednesday, intends to denounce “an internal distortion in the European Union”.