21. March 29, 2015 : “Noire semaine pour l’expertise”

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 “Noire semaine pour l’expertise”. All quotes, originally in French, were translated by me.


This article begins by talking about the IARC classifying glyphosate as a probable carcinogen. The agencyexpected its opinion not to pass “like a letter in the mail”, given the vast economic interests it would upset.

However, IARC is surprised that part of “this response” comes from the German health agency BfR (Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung). His criticism could be explained “perhaps” by the fact that a third of the experts on it belong to manufacturers marketing glyphosate-based products. On March 24, Médiapart also revealed that experts responsible for evaluating drugs had been “secretly paid as consultants by the pharmaceutical industry during their terms of office”.

The day after these revelations appeared in PeerJ under the signature of David Goulson (Goulson 2015) an article “with devastating conclusions for the credibility” of FERA (Food and Environment Research Agency) , the British food safety agency. He analyzed the data used for one of the latter’s reports. He observed that, contrary to the conclusions that had been drawn, the study would in fact have been the first study to describe the substantial negative impacts of NNIs in real conditions.

Asked about this “a spokesperson for FERA has more or less eaten his hat”. The main author is said to have left FERA and joined Syngenta in the months that followed.