For fourteen years, France has officially set itself the objective of drastically reducing its consumption of phytosanitary products. Although there is a consensus on the objective, the debates are fiercer on the means of achieving it and none of the three successive Ecophyto plans has been able to trigger a downward dynamic.
How do we measure the amount of pesticides used?
Since the volumes of phytosanitary products sold are not sufficient to measure the quantities of phytosanitary products used, a new indicator was put in place when the first Ecophyto plan was launched: the number of unit doses (NODU). It combines the quantities sold and the effectiveness of each substance according to the recommendations of the manufacturers and is expressed in number of hectares treated. On the other hand, it does not take into account the treatments of coated seeds, which are not counted in the database of sales of phytosanitary products.
Excluding organic agricultural land, nearly 102 million hectares were treated each year between 2017 and 2019, and each hectare of agricultural land received an average of 4.16 treatments per year.
How has the consumption of phytosanitary products evolved since 2008?
The phytosanitary product sales database distinguishes between substances according to their level of danger to humans and the environment. The graph below takes into account all of these substances and reflects the intensity of consumption of these products since 2008 in France.
In a report submitted to the government in March 2021, but published only a year later, the General Inspectorate of Finance scrutinizes the Ecophyto plans, even considering that “their prosecution as it stands raises the question of the credibility of public action”.
According to François Veillerette, spokesperson for Future Generations, “Ecophyto plans have not generated a dynamic for reducing the use of pesticides” and are “limited to highlighting good practices, which have remained marginal compared to practices which are largely unchanged”. He regrets the lack of a binding reduction target per farm, with, for example, a bonus-malus system.
What are the differences between agricultural zones?
Locally, the level of consumption of phytosanitary products is obviously very dependent on the type of agriculture practiced. The areas that consume the most pesticides are those with intensive field crops of cereals and oilseed and protein crops (in the North and the Paris Basin), viticulture and fruit growing.
The maps below show the consumption of products classified as dangerous for humans or for the environment, at the intermunicipal level. We can see that a large part of the north of the country concentrates, on average, more than five treatments per hectare and per year, and even around ten treatments per hectare on an axis extending from the Oise to the north of the Hauts- of France.
In the vineyards of Languedoc, as well as in the south-east of Bordeaux and around Cognac, the average number of treatments per hectare frequently exceeds ten treatments per hectare. Finally, the south of the Rhône valley, with its vineyards and fruit crops, stands out clearly with average values around ten treatments per hectare in Drôme Provençale or in Vaucluse.
What developments at the local level?
If, at the national level, the consumption of phytosanitary products has changed very little, we can note, on the other hand, some changes at the local level.
In the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, there is a clear trend towards an increase in the use of pesticides, areas which were already large consumers. This can be explained by additional treatments to compensate for the ban on neonicotinoids on beets and to deal with unfavorable climatic conditions (additional treatments on potatoes, for example).
On the vineyard side, in Bordeaux, where there was a high intensity of treatments, we could observe an evolution of practices with a downward trend in the number of treatments carried out. The same is true for Beaujolais.
On the other hand, the vineyards of Languedoc, from the Pyrénées-Orientales to the Hérault, and that of Provence in the Var experienced a significant increase, of one to two additional treatments per hectare on average.
Finally, in the south of the Rhône valley, between Ardèche, Drôme, Gard and Vaucluse, a downward trend is to be noted, up to 3.8 fewer treatments than three years ago. on the territory of the agglomeration community of Gard Rhodanien.
The methodology used
These maps are based on data from the CRATer project, which calculated the “number of unit doses” (NODU) for each intermunicipal authority (EPCI, public establishment for intermunicipal cooperation) from the database of sales of phytosanitary products since 2015 (previous localized data were not considered significant by the CRATer project’s scientific council) and the values of the reference unit doses published by decree by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
Data from the database of sales of active substances declared by distributors are recorded at the postal code of the company’s registered office, which is not always the place of use of the products; this is why we have chosen to present the figures reaggregated to the intermunicipal authority, larger than the delimitations of the postal codes, while allowing a fine reading of the territorial distribution. Large cities, however, can have outliers; the administrative address sometimes does not correspond to the area in which the products will be used. In addition, the very small agricultural areas in urban areas overestimate the NODU values per hectare.
Concerning the overseas departments and regions, the product sales data grouped by buyers’ postal code is very incomplete; it is therefore those grouped by postal code of the seller that have been used. For Mayotte, even the data “sellers” are incomplete and insignificant. Finally, purchases made abroad are not taken into account.
The calculation of the number of treatments per hectare is based on the useful agricultural areas (SAU, agricultural census of 2020), from which the areas in organic farming or in transition with the areas provided by Agence Bio have been counted.
In order to smooth out the annual variability, the maps are drawn from the three-year averages, 2018-2020 for the number of treatments map, 2015-2017 and 2018-2020 for the evolution map.