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France had set a voluntary target of halving
pesticide use in the decade to 2018 but it has in fact risen,
partly due to adverse weather conditions.
Like the EU as a whole, France has sought to become less
dependent on pesticides, which are blamed for posing health and
environmental risks. The EU has, for example, banned certain
crop chemicals known as neonicotinoids suspected of harming
bees.
The French government has pushed back to 2025 the timeline for
halving pesticide use and added an intermediate target of a 25
percent fall by 2020, Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll said
in an interview in daily newspaper Liberation.
The targets remain non-binding on farmers but Le Foll said his
revamped plan, to be detailed later on Friday, would encourage a
change in practices by expanding a network of pioneer farms
experimenting with alternative techniques.
"We have to diffuse these good practices," he said. "We are
going to increase the number of these farms to 3,000."
Some 2,000 farms already in the network on average saw pesticide
use fall 12 percent in 2013, a year that saw a 9 percent rise in
total use in France, he said.
The minister says pesticide usage can be cut both through
technology that allows farmers to apply crop treatments more
precisely, and through biological control that replaces
chemicals with natural organisms.
In its new plan, the government will also add a binding target
on pesticide suppliers to reduce their volumes by 20 percent
over five years, encouraging them to shift towards selling
farmers services to reduce chemical use, he said.
Companies will face penalties if they fail to meet the target
under a certificate scheme to be developed, he said.
Representatives of crop farmers argue that tightening
restrictions on pesticide use have left them with few viable
options for containing crop pests and diseases.
"Arbitrarily reducing the quantities of phyto-sanitary products
is illusory as long as the solutions for achieving that goal are
not available," grain farmers lobby Orama said in a statement.
(Reporting by Gus Trompiz; Editing by Mark Potter)
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