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 “Pourquoi le « GIEC de la biodiversité » est mal parti”. All quotes, originally in French, were translated by me.
Created in April 2012, the mission of IPBES would be to synthesize available knowledge on biodiversity, on the impacts of its erosion and on possible courses of action to preserve it. In short, to be to biodiversity what the IPCC is to the fight against global warming.
However, it is not certain whether she will earn comparable credit. Indeed, one of his first reports will be on pollinator decline, and in the task force there are scientists employed by Syngenta and Bayer. These, having no scientific credit, are there only to “represent their employers”.
“Of course, private sector experts are very limited: two out of a total of twenty-one in two of the six working groups. As for the other experts, they are academics or scientists from public research organizations. But this does not exclude other conflicts of interest, through funding, links forged between their institutions and the agrochemical industry, remuneration as a consultant, etc. At IPBES, we are assured that everyone had to submit a statement detailing this type of relationship with industry. It’s happy. But, alas, these documents are not public…”
It would be all the more suspicious as Simon Potts is co-chair of the IPBES committee. He celebrated the moratorium on 3 NNIs in 2013 and asserted that “The weight of evidence given by researchers clearly indicates that we need to phase out neonicotinoids.” However, he said the opposite 6 months later, judging that there was “currently no consensus on their lethal and sublethal impacts [on pollinators] in the environment.”
This turnaround questions S. Foucart, who also notes that in May 2014 this researcher signed a study on NNI which greatly appealed to manufacturers. In this study, “neither the financing of the study nor the possible conflicts of interest of its authors were specified …”
This casts doubt on the impartiality of the organization.