IIt took a certain audacity to ask, on the very day of the announcement of the government’s water plan, to maintain a pesticide responsible for widespread contamination of groundwater: Marc Fesneau got it. Speaking at the annual congress of the National Federation of Farmers’ Unions (FNSEA), which was held from March 28 to 30 in Angers (Maine-et-Loire), the Minister of Agriculture and Sovereignty announced that it had asked the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (Anses) to “reassessing his decision on S-metolachlor”. The agency announced on February 15 its decision to suspend the main uses of this herbicide.
The reason for this ban is simple. It is due to the application of European regulations: the degradation products of this substance – classified “suspected carcinogen” – are found at non-regulatory levels in groundwater and pollute the water distributed to several million French people. After having tried, without success, to reduce these levels of contamination by reducing the authorized doses, ANSES had no choice but to announce that it was suspending the major uses of this product – the authorization prerogatives and withdrawal of pesticides, veterinary drugs and biocides have indeed belonged to the agency since the 2014 law on agriculture and food.
Unprecedented pressure
Mr. Fesneau justified his exit by arguing that this decision “is not aligned with the European calendar”, leading to a distortion of competition. The Minister and his services cannot however ignore that the conclusions of ANSES have been confirmed by European agencies and that the days of S-metolachlor are – barring infringement of Union law – now numbered across the whole continent. . The French agency will simply have acted swiftly to preserve health and the environment, only going ahead, in all likelihood, of the European schedule by a few weeks.
At ANSES, the Minister’s remarks were received, with amazement, as a serious interference by political power in expertise. The Minister cannot ignore that the strict application of the law does not allow the Director General of ANSES to postpone a decision to manage health or environmental risks for industrial reasons. Moreover, the Court of Justice of the European Union recalled it in a judgment of January 19: in terms of pesticides, the imperatives of health and respect for the environment take precedence, at least in theory, over the imperatives of production.
This pressure is unprecedented on the part of a minister, who is moreover one of the agency’s supervising ministers. It comes a few weeks after the publication, on March 10, of a report by ANSES’s scientific council urging it to better take into account the most recent scientific knowledge in the development of its opinions – i.e. to show greater rigor in the protection of public health and ecosystems. Besides constituting new empirical evidence of the influence of agro-industrial interests on the definition and conduct of public policies, this pressure is a worrying sign of the relationship of certain political leaders to scientific expertise. It should be followed when it is deemed favorable, and if not changed.