Aligrada de Acetamipride, the law duplicates its excellent legislative career following the mobilization of the Union, a request for protest that exceeded two million signatures and the partial censorship of the Constitutional Council. The last brick of promises made to the majority agricultural unions at the time of winter mobilizations, the agricultural law, which bears the name of Senator Laurent Dupumb (LR), author of the initial bill, resorted to political soap.
His most sensitive measure, which has occupied the media space, was undoubtedly the reintroduction of a pesticide of the neonicotinoid family, acetamipride. The latter has been prohibited in France since 2018, but is still authorized in other parts of Europe. Beats and hazelnut producers asked for their return to fight certain pests. I adopt by parliamentarians, the measure was censored by the Constitutional Council, considering that insufficiently framed.
Water storage, ANSS paper, construction of cattle buildings … Beyond the censorship of the return of acetamipride, the Constitutional Council, however, validated other key provisions carried by the Dupber Law, with some adjustments.
• Reproduction buildings
One of the articles facilitates the creation of intensive breeding buildings. This article makes possible, among other things, relieve public consultation procedures during the construction or expansion of new buildings replacing the public meeting with a permanence in the City Council during public investigation.
In addition, the text raises the thresholds (that is, the number of animals) from which breeders must obtain an environmental authorization. Until now, these thresholds have aligned with the European Directive related to industrial broadcasts, but will be aligned with another more permissive directive, since the end of 2026. For example, a chicken coop will only have to request an authorization of 85,000 chickens, against 40,000 chickens today.
• ANSS and OFB role
The text also redesign the role of the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Labor Safety (ANSE), forced since 2015 to evaluate the danger of pesticides and authorize their marketing. The ANS now must take into account “agronomic, phytosanitary and environmental circumstances, including the climatic that prevails in the national territory” when it examines the placement in the market and the use of pesticides.
In addition, another article is working to appease relations between the French Office of Biodiversity (OFB), in charge of the Environmental Police and certain farmers. Ofb agents will be equipped with “individual cameras” and can proceed to “an audiovisual recording of their interventions” in the police and gendarmerie model. The position of the Prefect, of ofb’s territorial delegate, is also reinforced.
• Water storage
Water storage for the irrigation of cultures was one of the sensitive measures of the double law, in a context of rarefaction linked to climate change and debates around the “mega-bases.” One of the articles specifies that the deductions of agricultural water storage, composed of the water table or water courses, are now supposed to be “of great general interest”, to facilitate the procedures to obtain construction authorizations.
But the Constitutional Council issued two interpretation reserves: groundwater samples exclude inertial tablecloths, that is, aquatic tables that are emptied or slowly filled, and construction projects will be questionable before a judge despite the presumption of great general interest.
Source: BFM TV
