The European Commission has proposed renewing the authorization of glyphosate for ten years. The President of the Republic, who had expressed his desire to ban this controversial pesticide, has since evolved on the issue.
The European Commission proposed on Wednesday September 20 to renew the authorization of glyphosate, a controversial herbicide, for ten additional years. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which issued a report last summer, does not consider it dangerous enough to justify a ban. But this proposal will have to be validated by the representatives of the 27 Member States, where the question has been debated for many years. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s position has evolved significantly on the subject. In November 2017, the very recent President of the Republic tweeted with the hashtag “Make Our Planet Great Again”, his environmentalist slogan. “I asked the government to take the necessary measures so that the use of glyphosate is banned in France within three years at the latest,” he writes. The ambitious objective is then to achieve a ban on glyphosate in 2021.
>> Glyphosate: the European Commission proposes to renew the authorization of the herbicide in the EU for ten years
But making this promise a reality, in an agricultural country like France which is a large consumer of glyphosate, is not so simple. At the time, the European Union did not initially show the same ambition as Emmanuel Macron. The current authorization of glyphosate in the EU is renewed for five years in 2017, until December 2022. But it was extended by one year pending a scientific evaluation by the European Food Safety Authority. food.
A promise quickly buried
In France, a war of influence even pitted two of Emmanuel Macron’s ministers against each other on the issue. In 2017, the Minister of Ecological Transition Nicolas Hulot, a fervent slayer of pesticides, opposed Stéphane Travert, Minister of Agriculture and supporter of glyphosate. Nicolas Hulot experienced a failure in 2018, when deputies rejected the inclusion of the objective of banning glyphosate in the law. This will be one of the reasons for the resignation of the former Minister of Ecological Transition. He denounced pressure from lobbies, particularly agricultural ones, and left the government in August 2018.
Six months later, Emmanuel Macron ended up burying his promise during the Great Debate. “Can we say that there will be no more glyphosate in five years? It’s impossible. I’m not going to lie to you, it’s not true. If I told you that, I would completely kill certain sectors“, he said. “We will continue to buy wheat which will be made locally with round-up [le produit contenant du glyphosate le plus connu] or worse, and we would have told our farmers that they no longer have the right to use it?“, illustrated the President of the Republic.
Emmanuel Macron’s regrets
Glyphosate was finally banned from public spaces and then from private gardens in 2019, but not for agricultural use. Emmanuel Macron, at the end of his first mandate in January 2022, drives the point home and even regrets having made this promise on glyphosate, in an interview with Parisian. “This is the mistake I made at the start of my five-year term: we must act on these issues at European level,” he admits. The President of the Republic therefore relies on the European Union. It remains to be seen France’s position on this proposal from the European Commission to authorize glyphosate for ten years. Stéphane Séjourné, the secretary general of Renaissance, said Thursday September 21 on France Inter that “at this stage“, France will vote against.