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 “L’arrêté encadrant le retour des néonicotinoïdes s’appuie sur des données erronées”. All quotes, originally in French, were translated by me.
One of the issues of NNI’s authorization on beetroot fields is the issue of post-treated beet crops. It would therefore be necessary to wait one to three years before sowing crops that are attractive to bees.
Farmers demanded the right to be able to replant corn without delay. During a meeting of the supervisory board on January 22, representatives of the beet industry argued that a study showed that 80% of the bees present in a corn plot were in a strip of 8 meters on the periphery of the plots. Not treating this area would then make it possible to plant corn over the entire field.
This mitigation was adopted by the decree of February 5. The ITAB reportedly consulted the study in question and observed that, in fact, if 80% of the bees surveyed were in the periphery, this area had been the most sampled. On recalculation, the ITAB would have found that to protect 80% of the bees on 50 hectares of maize would require an untreated strip of 189 meters.