This page is a part of the corpus (Annexe 1) used to write Stéphane Foucart and neonicotinoids.
Here, I relate what the journalist said in his article « Les néonicotinoïdes sont des substances trop efficaces et trop persistantes pour que leur usage puisse être contrôlé ». All quotes, originally in French, were translated by me.
Barbara Pompili warned in 2016 that “scientific studies are piling up” to show the dangers of NNI to not only bees, but also our health and the environment in general.
“Promoted by agribusiness circles, taken up by the Minister of Agriculture, echoed by journalists and multiplied endlessly on social networks by thousands of little hands, a single element of language has swept away all of this. No one is unaware of it any more: “Bee don’t forage in the beetroot fields. “”
Nonetheless, NNIs are too dangerous and too persistent to be controlled, especially because of their solubility in water. This is what Japanese researchers would have shown in 2019. Foucart recalls the results of the study by Yamamuro et al. (2019), which he previously presented in his article of October 31, 2019 (59). He insists on the low amount of imidacloprid to which the aquatic populations studied were exposed and the magnitude of the effects. This study has 3 lessons:
- “The first is that a negligible amount of neonics applied over a large area can have a catastrophic effect […]. “;
- “The second lesson is an immediate corollary of the first: no confidence can be placed in regulatory environmental risk assessment systems. Bankruptcy of this magnitude is simply unforgivable. “
- Finally, “the collapse of Lake Shinji shows that technical innovations – neonics in this case – can have negative effects which, while enormous, can go under the radar for a long time without being documented. The absence of proof, the difficulty or the impossibility of administering the proof are, implicitly, interpreted as as much proof of the absence of deleterious effects. “
The journalist concludes:
“Thus, during all this time, if the Shinji fishermen had complained to their caretaker minister about the practices of their rice-growing neighbors, they would no doubt have been answered with assurance that their concerns were unfounded. It’s well known: “Fish don’t forage in rice paddies.” “