It would be “useful” to shed light on the margins of companies that sell pesticides to farmers, said a parliamentary commission of inquiry in a report released Thursday, suggesting that they make “indecent margins” and should pay more taxes.
The main points of the report were presented last week by its rapporteur, the socialist deputy Dominique Potier.
He had described an archetype of a failure of public policies to free farmers from their dependence on synthetic herbicides, fungicides and insecticides.
The full report, nearly 300 pages long, was published Thursday. It makes 26 recommendations, including that of protecting catchments for drinking water supply by opening in particular the possibility of expropriating an operator to stop the contamination of the resource by pesticide residues.
The report also recommends lifting the veil on the blind spot in production costs of farmers’ suppliers: manufacturers of machinery, fertilizers and pesticides.
Everything suggests that, in different ways, this sector is not exempt from indecent margins and opportunity profits, it is underlined.
Requested by AFP, the French organization representing pesticide manufacturers, Phyteis, did not immediately respond.
The rapporteur indicates that he went to the Minister of the Economy in November to assess the contribution to national taxation of manufacturers of phytosanitary products – including Syngenta, Bayer, Corteva and BASF gloves.
The controls (…) left me speechless: paying 110 million euros in corporate tax for 2.4 billion euros in turnover implies either very low profitability or a massive transfer of costs [une pratique visant rduire la base imposable, NDLR]. I’ll let you imagine the hypothesis which is mine, he declared to the other members of the commission, according to a report annexed to the report.
In addition, half of these taxes are recovered [par les entreprises] in the form of a research tax credit (CIR) whose use is not oriented – we do not know whether it will be devoted to questionable molecules or really interesting ones from a technoscientific point of view, added the deputy for Meurthe- and Moselle.
We can still question the profit margins and taxation of the large groups which carry out 90% of the phytopharmaceutical trade in our country, when we see that they ultimately only pay a little less than 60 million corporate tax, he insisted.