29
Aug
Grassroots Uprising in France Stymies Industry Effort To Bring Back Bee-Killing Insecticide
(Beyond Pesticides, August 29, 2025) It did not go without notice to U.S. grassroots environmental and public health advocates that earlier this month, over two million people in France signed a “first of its kind” petition that ultimately prevented the overturning of the country’s ban on bee-killing neonicotinoid insecticides. The action was widely covered in France, including in Le Monde. This uprising, organized by 23-year-old French master’s student Eleonore Pattery, emphasizes the importance of individuals in communities mobilizing people to protect the planet from pesticides that are having a devastating adverse effect on health and the environment.
The grassroots push in France taps into a deep public concern about health and the environment that is emblematic of the level of public engagement needed to thwart the high level of chemical industry, agribusiness, and allied corporate influence that undermines basic protections. Industry interests have long been embedded in federal environmental and public health laws. For example, federal and state pesticide laws (the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and similar state laws) allow widespread exposure to toxic chemicals despite the availability of nontoxic alternatives that are both efficacious and cost-effective. Without public engagement, as seen in France, significant improvements in law are constantly under threat of reversal, as was the case with the adoption of state laws preempting the rights of local governments to restrict pesticides and overriding a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding local democratic decision-making on protecting health and the environment. Now, proposals sit before Congress to establish federal preemption of state and local authority to restrict pesticides. With major jury verdicts in the billions of dollars against Bayer/Monsanto in the courts, which establish chemical companies’ liability for their failure to warn consumers of product hazards, the chemical industry to pushing legislation in Congress and the states to create a shield against any future nondisclosure to those harmed.
Rollbacks are now taking place that will have adverse generational effects on health, biodiversity, and climate. A bright spot in Maine, one of the handful of states that have protected local authority to restrict pesticides, exemplified earlier this year the power of local communities coming together to take action, as elected officials and community members organized to protect a local ordinance that bans synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and advances organic land management on public and private property.
Recent Developments
In France, the story begins with legislation passed on July 8, which would have allowed for the use of the neonicotinoid acetamiprid that was originally banned in 2018. The bill was dubbed “Duplomb law” based on the surname of the conservative lawmaker who authored the bill.
“The high court has blocked the key clause of the so-called Duplomb Law, which sought to reauthorize the use of acetamiprid, a pesticide banned in France since 2018 due to its impact on bees and other pollinators,” according to reporting by The European Conservative. They continue: “The Constitutional Council ruled on Thursday [August 7] that the reintroduction of acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid pesticide, was insufficiently regulated by the Duplomb law, noting that it was not limited in time or to a specific sector, and also concerned spraying, which carries a high risk of dispersing harmful substances.”
This would not have been possible without Ms. Pattery’s petition. Once a petition passes half a million in signatures, “the heads of parliamentary groups or parliamentary committees can propose to organize a parliamentary debate on it,” according to reporting by Politico and rules laid out in Article 148 of the Rules of the National Assembly. President Emmanuel Macron signed the modified bill into law on August 12, with French Health Minister Yannick Neuder calling for the European Union (EU) to reassess the potential toxicity of the neonicotinoid on human health, according to reporting by France 24.
Leadership in the European Union and France
In recent years, France and the European Union more broadly have been instrumental in global leadership on pesticide regulations but also in identifying opportunities to advance alternative systems, including organic.
The French government announced in May 2024 a new plan – Ecophyto 2030 – to cut pesticide use in half by 2030, rather than the original plan that was paused as a result of widespread farmer protests across the European Union. (See Daily News here.) France has demonstrated leadership in protecting the public from exposure, being the first country to enforce a strict ban on use in public landscapes and private lawns routinely used by the public in 2022. (See Daily News here.) These public and privately-owned public areas include, but are not limited to, hotels, community gardens, cemeteries, nursing homes and health centers, and sports facilities. There are only some exemptions to this law, including invasive species and serious public health threats. France’s policy initiative set the tone for the European Union-wide target to cut in half the use of overall toxic pesticides by 2030. Environmental and health advocates recognize the importance of EU member states in developing comprehensive policies, given the U.S. deference to corporate interests and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) then-Secretary Tom Vilsack’s rejection of coordinating with the EU Farm to Fork (F2F) initiative. Meanwhile, France was one of several nations to vote in favor of the EU ban on the use of three neonicotinoid pesticides (clothianidin, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam) on all field crops in 2017. Separate from the EU-wide policy, France set the tone by maintaining one of the strongest neonic bans in the EU back in 2018, amidst potential threats to relax the ban.
As organic is increasingly understood to be a climate solution, OrganicClimateNet last year launched an aggressive effort to build the base of organic farmers in the European Union (EU). The four overarching goals of this Network, according to their website, are:
- To engage farmers in climate organic farming;
- To enhance the capacity for climate organic farming;
- To develop smart policies & consumer engagement; and
- To foster a climate-neutral and resilient Europe
OrganicClimateNET is one of several EU-funded initiatives aimed at expanding organic agriculture in Europe. OrganicTargets4EU tracks opportunities and obstacles to meet EU and member state-specific national organic targets in the service of fulfilling the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies. Additionally, through the facilitation and curation of Organic Knowledge Hubs, farmers, advocates, journalists, policymakers, the general public, and other stakeholders can access data, studies, and other information relating to crop production, animal husbandry, food chain management, environment and society, and farm management. (See Daily News here.) See another Daily News, New European Union Organic Regulations Increase Rigor of Import Standards, to learn more about recent policy changes to EU organic regulations that went into effect in January 2025.
“The share of the EU’s agricultural land under organic farming increased from 5.9% in 2012 to 10.5% in 2022 as a result of an increasing demand for organic products and policy support,” according to European Environmental Agency data. France has increased at a similar rate to the EU-wide adoption of organic in this same period.
Previous Research
A 2023 study published in Environmental Health by researchers at Stockholm University and the Centre for Organic Food and Farming in Uppsala builds on earlier work that documents deficiencies in information provided to EU regulators by manufacturers. They identify nine studies on developmental neurotoxicity (DNT) that had been submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) but were not disclosed to EU authorities. According to the research, seven of these studies would have “actual or potential regulatory impact.” According to the authors, “Of the nine undisclosed DNT studies, three were sponsored by Bayer and performed in their own laboratory. Three studies were sponsored by Syngenta and performed in their Central Toxicology Laboratory. One study each was sponsored by Nissan Chemicals and Ishihara Sangyo Kaisha (ISK), and these were performed at Huntingdon Life Sciences. For the remaining study, the sponsor and laboratory are unknown to us.” This study is yet another example of industry capture of regulatory agencies designed to serve the public interest. (See Daily News here.)
This disturbing pattern of regulatory capture continues as the scientific literature continues to provide additional evidence on the toxic health and environmental impacts of pesticides. Researchers at the University of Caxias do Sul in Brazil identified 29 peer-reviewed scientific studies with statistically significant findings that tie pesticide use to cancer diagnoses in agricultural populations across the world, including France. This literature review includes findings from clinical trials, as well as epidemiologic, case-control, and experimental studies. (See Daily News here.) Researchers in Luxembourg and France detect 69 biomarkers of pollutants and pesticides—12 of which are banned—in hair samples from over 200 French children. Data was provided for this study originated from 3.5-year-old children recruited from the Étude Longitudinale Française depuis l’Enfance (ELFE) [French Longitudinal Study since Childhood] cohort. (See Daily News here.) Regulatory agencies should embody the precautionary principle to avoid long-term exposure and bioaccumulation of pesticide compounds. Health officials in France learned this lesson the hard way in 2023, just one year after a slew of pesticide restrictions and policies were signed into law, when they found that a majority of drinking water samples tested by the government contained the presence of the highly toxic fungicide chlorothalonil (banned in the EU since 2019). (See Daily News here.)
Research institutions in France, including Université de Rennes, Université de Paris-Saclay, L’Institut Agro Rennes-Angers, European Society for Agronomy, France’s National Research for Agriculture (INRAE), published research this year on the ecological and public health benefits of organic farming. The researchers conducted this study on forty winter wheat fields at “Zone Atelier Armorique,” also known as the Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) site in north-western France. Twenty of the fields are organically managed, and the other twenty are not. “Indeed, under organic farming, no phytosanitary products are used on wheat, and nitrogen inputs are lower despite the use of organic manure () (). In all responding phyla, as expected, increasing nitrogen and phytosanitary inputs had a detrimental effect on species richness and shaped sequence-cluster composition (),” the researchers explain, as the beneficial impacts of the low-to-zero input approach of organic farming systems. (See Daily News here.)
Call to Action
There are various actions that you can take to realize a more sustainable future.
You can sign up here to become a Parks for a Sustainable Future advocate, collaborating with us to make change in your community by moving your town, city, or county beyond pesticide reliance for public green spaces.
You can see here to sign up for the Weekly News Update and Action of the Week to stay updated on ways to take action, from the local to the international.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
Source(s): The European Conservative, Le Monde, European Environmental Agency, Politico, Rules of the National Assembly, France 24, Tennessee Lookout, Mountain State Spotlight, and Maryland Matters
