2023-12-21 08:00:03
A lost decade or almost, an increasingly pressing urgency to act and political leaders still little mobilized: the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the use of pesticides in France made public its final report, Thursday, December 21, and provides a grim overview of the situation. It also puts forward around thirty recommendations likely to allow public authorities to regain control of this subject.
The first observation is that of the failure of successive plans to reduce the use of pesticides. In 2008, the Ecophyto plan was supposed to reduce the use of these products by 50% by 2018. As no reduction was really initiated in 2015, the plan was converted into the Ecophyto 2 plan, pushing back the deadline to 2025. In 2018, it is the turn of the Ecophyto 2 + plan to take over, this time setting the horizon of a reduction by half to 2030.
The objective being still untenable in view of current trajectories, the government announced the consultation of an Ecophyto 2030 plan which maintains the objective of a reduction by half in 2030, but this time compared to the 2015 average. 2017, rather than the 2009-2011 average, taken as a reference by previous plans. “No one would understand a change in the reference level which would significantly lower ambition, says Dominique Potier (PS), deputy for Meurthe-et-Moselle and rapporteur of the commission. It is also an issue of credibility of the action of public authorities. »
Public money invested in vain
For Mr. Potier, the Ecophyto plan is, in its successive versions, “like a car without a driver and without a dashboard, which travels on a road without radar and whose passengers spend their time discussing whether the destination is relevant”. The lack of interest in the pesticide reduction plan is illustrated, according to Mr. Potier, by the fact that “the Ecophyto interministerial steering committee did not meet once between 2019 and 2023”.
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One of the key lessons from the parliamentary report comes from the conclusions of an inspection mission delivered in March 2021, and made public by the government more than two years after their finalization. The inspection mission established that the 71 million euros of annual investment in the Ecophyto plans only form a small part of all public expenditure allocated, in vain, to the reduction in the use of “phytos”. “. This is located, according to the report, at approximately 643 million euros, for the reference year 2019. Thus, not only has no significant drop in pesticides been recorded since 2008, but the public money invested in the pursuit of this objective was in vain.
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