37. November 18, 2017 : “Pesticides : l’Italie a montré qu’il existe des alternatives”
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 “Pesticides : l’Italie a montré qu’il existe des alternatives”. All quotes, originally in French, were translated by me.
A study conducted by Lorenzo Furlan created a mutual fund that fulfills the same crop insurance role as NNIs. It brought together farmers representing nearly 50,000 hectares, each contributing 3 to 5 € / hectare, ie 7 to 10 times less than the said pesticides. (mentioned in Furlan et al. 2018)
This type of alternative is all the more urgent as a study has estimated that in “thirty years, nearly 80% of flying insects have disappeared from protected natural areas in Germany” (Hallmann et al. 2017). The fact that they are not more frequent stems from the confusion between the sale of phytosanitary products and the advice to farmers:
“In Italy, the companies that provide technical advice to farmers are also those that sell them pesticides,” replies Lorenzo Furlan. And we constantly tell them that they will lose their harvest if they do not use these products…”The same observation holds true for France: all the parliamentary reports on the subject highlight this institutional conflict of interest which leads to mechanically upwards the use of phytosanitary products. “