On Thursday, before the congress of the majority agricultural union, the FNSEA, the agriculture minister announced that he had asked the French Health Security Agency (Anses) to reconsider its desire to ban the main uses of S-metolachlor, an herbicide.
Highly criticized after this announcement, persists in a column published Saturday on his Twitter accountassuming his election in the name of “food sovereignty”.
Marc Fesneau calls for “properly presenting the debate” and “changing the method to move forward”, regretting being exposed to “caricature”, “as if the greatest challenge of our time, the fight against climate change and the essential ecological transition, could can only be conceived as a pitched battle”.
Recalling that Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne announced a “strategic action plan to anticipate the withdrawal of potentially problematic active substances” that should reconcile food sovereignty and the ecological transition, she considers that this planning “must not introduce a distortion of competition with our European neighbours”.
A “scandal in the protection of public health and the environment”
The ANSES, in charge of evaluating and authorizing or not pesticides, announced on February 15 that it was beginning a withdrawal procedure for this agricultural herbicide widely used in France in corn, soybeans and sunflowers, and whose chemical derivatives have been detected above the limits allowed in groundwater and therefore potentially in drinking water.
“I will not be the minister who will abandon strategic decisions for our food sovereignty to the sole discretion of an agency,” Marc Fesneau had launched.
The NGO Générations Futures immediately denounced a “scandal regarding the protection of public health and the environment” while the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) listed this herbicide as a “suspected carcinogenic substance” last June. Several elected socialists and environmentalists also deplored an attack on the independence of ANSES.
In his text, Marc Fesneau assures that the expertise or the role of ANSES “have never been called into question” and justifies his position by “the necessary synchronization and coherence” with the European calendar, without ruling on the risks for the health associated with this herbicide. .
In a letter to ANSES that he also made public on Twitter, the Minister explains that a ban decision by the European Commission cannot take place before November 2024, that is, “until two years after the end of use at the French level” , judging such a discrepancy “difficult to understand”.
Source: BFM TV
