France Seeks to Cut Pesticide Use in Half
Over in France, a farmer has successfully sued Monsanto for pesticide poisoning. The farmer claims he suffered a raft of neurological troubles after inhaling the agrochemical giant’s Lasso herbicide while cleaning his sprayer in 2004. The court’s ruling against Monsanto “could lend weight to other health claims against pesticides,” according to Reuters.
All very interesting, but what caught my eye was this background bit toward the end of the story:
France, the EU’s largest agricultural producer, is now targeting a 50 percent reduction in pesticide use between 2008 and 2018, with initial results showing a 4 percent cut in farm and non-farm use in 2008-2010.
Wait, France has a national policy in place to slash pesticide use within less than a decade? That’s news to me. So I did a little digging and found that back in 2008, the French government rolled out a plan called Ecophyto 2018 in response to the European Union’s 2006 Sustainable Use Directive, which called for all EU countries to concoct national policies on cutting pesticide use. Ecophyto sets an ambitious agenda for French agriculture: to meet the pesticide-reduction target while maintaining production levels.
And that’s not all. After launching Ecophyto in 2008, the French government amended it in 2009 to add to more lofty goals, according to ENDURE, an EU-funded nonprofit that promotes integrated pest management. It’s now official French policy to to expand certified-organic acreage from 2 percent of the nation’s total farmland in 2009 to 20 percent by 2020; push at least half of the nation’s farms to achieve “high environmental value” certification, which involves reaching certain levels of on-farm biodiversity and reduction in fertilizer use; and to withdraw 40 toxic pesticides from commercial use.
Now, these goals aren’t binding, and I need to dig into just how the French government plans to reach them. But in laying them out, the government creates conditions for agricultural innovation that don’t involve chemicals. French crop breeders, for example, are already selecting for plant varieties that do well amid weed pressure, reducing the need for herbicides. The transnational corporations that dominate US agriculture, by contrast, are fixated on generating seeds that withstand herbicide cocktails.
Indeed, being an American citizen in the early 21st century, I find it stunning that a government would intervene explicitly against the interests of the agrochemical industry. Our once-in-five-years Farm Bill, due for reauthorization this year, gives farmers incentives to produce as much of a few select crops (corn, soy, cotton) as possible, environment be damned. Our USDA, even under Obama, routinely rubber-stamps the latest herbicide marketing schemes cooked up by Monsanto and its few peers. Meanwhile, the USDA patronizes organic agriculture as a marketing niche; it would never occur to US policymakers to push for a dramatic expansion of organics.
In Europe, evidently, they do things differently. The herbicide that allegedly poisoned that French farmer back in 2004, the one that just won him a judgment against Monsanto? Its chemical name is Alachlor; the Pesticide Action Network has it listed as a “bad actor” based on cancer and endocrine-disruption concerns. The European Union banned it in 2007. Monsanto still happily sells it here.
The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts. […] We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
DDT, so safe you can eat it (1947): This is clipped from the record of the 1946 campaign to check an epidemic of malaria in the Kipsigis tribal reserve in the Kisumu district of north-west Kenya by spraying village huts with DDT. A team of public health workers are sent into the rural areas to convince villagers that spraying their huts with DDT will help stop the disease. When the skeptical tribal headman, Arap Kipkoi, resists DDT as poisonous, the British officer has DDT sprayed on a bowl of porridge and then eats a mouthful to prove DDT is not dangerous to humans. DDT is not very acutely toxic, so this misleading demonstration was possible. But the hazards from DDT are long term and it is certainly not “safe”. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) is a potent insecticide that was used worldwide for agricultural and public health purposes from the 1940s until the 1970s, when concern about its toxic effects on wildlife and humans, its environmental persistence, and its concentration in the food supply led to restrictions and prohibitions on its use. DDT was identified as a potent insecticide in 1939 and was heavily used during World War II. After the war, DDT became the global insecticide of choice in households, for agriculture, and for public health vector-control projects. In 1962, Rachel Carson, in Silent Spring, noted that DDT bioaccumulates and biomagnifies up the food chain and raised concerns that the pesticide may have long-lasting effects on wildlife and on humans.
The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts. […] We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
Currently Reading: Silent Spring
Rarely does a single book alter the course of history, but Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did exactly that. The outcry that followed its publication in 1962 forced the government to ban DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson’s book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement. It is without question one of the landmark books of the twentieth century. “Silent Spring became a runaway bestseller, with international reverberations… [It is] well crafted, fearless and succinct… Even if she had not inspired a generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters” (Peter Matthiessen, for Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Century).
Hello. I'm Kevin. I'm French and I currently live in Montreal where I study Business and Environmental Science at Concordia University. You'll find here some of the things that I read and find interesting. 
