Lhe emergence and lightning diffusion of certain words, which suddenly shape public debate, has something fascinating about it. Thus the martial vocabulary suddenly appeared on December 31, 2023 in the presidential speech and, since then, tirelessly commented on, echoed, taken up, repeated, and above all mended to the point of indigestion by the members of the government: we must rearm, we must everything rearm.
Armament, weapons have become in a few weeks the metric of everything. “Demographic rearmament”, “civic rearmament”, “moral rearmament”, “rearmament of public services”… It is therefore in the context of a rapid – and quite worrying – spread of this warlike terminology that the Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, and the Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau, announced, Thursday 1er February, the start of the major maneuvers of the “agricultural rearmament”.
If “agricultural rearmament” there is, it is above all a “chemical rearmament” of agriculture that is in question. At a time when infertility and chronic diseases are on the rise in the general population, where around a third of French households receive tap water that does not meet quality criteria due to pesticide metabolites, where undoubtedly more than 80% of the biomass of flying insects and 60% of field birds have disappeared in forty years, we like to imagine the nervous laughter of hypothetical historians who would seek, in the coming decades, to describe and above all understand the logic of what is happening these days.
The end of an ambition
The Ecophyto plan is first put on hold, the time, as Mr. Attal said, to “set up a new indicator”. Benign in appearance, this announcement actually signals the death of the plan intended to reduce the use of pesticides in France. But after all, what does it matter, one might object, since the Ecophyto plan has, since its launch in 2008, completely failed to achieve its objectives.
It is not so simple. First, despite its relative inefficiency, the plan was the embodiment of a shared desire to reduce the pressure of pesticides on the environment and health. Then and above all, it was based on a stable indicator – the NODU (number of unit doses) – reflecting the reality of the uses of “phytos” and their evolution over time.
This is a much more important and subtle question than it seems. A simple thought experiment helps us understand why. Imagine an indicator mainly linked to the quantity of different products used on the plots. If you replace 10 kilograms of DDT (an organochlorine insecticide) spread on a field, with 1 kg of imidacloprid (a neonicotinoid insecticide) used on the same field, your indicator will tell you that you have reduced the use of insecticides by 90%. . You will therefore be very satisfied and you will be able to announce this figure without fear of denial. But this 90% reduction would actually correspond to an increase in damage to pollinators of around 80,000%, since 1 gram of imidacloprid can kill as many bees as 8 kg of DDT.
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