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 insecticides Gaucho, Cruiser et Poncho enfument la ruche”. All quotes, originally in French, were translated by me.
Still with regard to the same announcement from the European Commission (probable suspension on December 1 of the 3 NNIs), S. Foucart puts into perspective:
“Hailed on Monday April 29 as a victory by the beekeeping world and environmental organizations”, “it can also, on the contrary, be interpreted as a crushing defeat. “
Indeed, the decision of the commission is late, which is the “symptom of a tremendous failure of the risk assessment systems”. The agrochemical companies thus come out “by no means losing their clash with beekeepers and conservationists”. (Implied they would have had time to make a profit?) NNIs should have been banned many years ago. Indeed, they are “the most effective insecticides ever synthesized” and, used in seed coating, the plant secretes them throughout its life. “It turns millions of hectares of field crops into insecticide fields by default.”
Their deployment, in the mid-1990s in France, would have corresponded to a sharp acceleration in the decline of pollinating insects. In 2003, an expert group set up by the French government had already concluded that “imidacloprid (marketed under the name Gaucho) presented an unacceptable risk to bees”. Yet it was not until 2013 that EFSA issued an opinion condemning the 3 NNIs, on the basis of which the proposed ban on NNIs was proposed. This moratorium would therefore be “a decade late”. It would also be limited, affecting only certain NNIs and certain uses (eg use for winter wheat would remain authorized).
This inertia is linked in particular to certain “expertises”, such as that of AFSSA in 2008, “taking up, sometimes under questionable conditions of integrity, the vulgate of agrochemists: bee disorders being” multifactorial “, new phytosanitary products would play no determining role. “