Water management, defense against wolves, reintroduction of banned pesticides… With numerous measures that irritate even the government, the examination of the agricultural emergency bill in the Senate promises to revive divisions from Monday June 29, a year after the revolt against the Duplomb law.
Tenacious agricultural anger since last winter, divided political parties, windy associations and an embarrassed government… While the upper house takes up the text from 4:00 p.m., the combined ingredients suggest a fairly explosive cocktail in the hemicycle, even if the debates there are usually agreed. Dominated by an alliance between the right and the centrists, the Senate intends to go further than the government’s bill, promising to lift a little more the constraints on the profession of farmer in several key sectors such as water management or wolf predation.
Adopted in the National Assembly at the beginning of June with support ranging from the presidential camp to the National Rally, this text is erected as a response to the mobilization of the agricultural world, who came to demonstrate in January to the gates of the Palais-Bourbon with tractors and banners. But will it be successful before the summer suspension of parliamentary work at the end of July, as the government hopes?
The timetable is tenable, but the government has publicly expressed its concerns about the senators’ intentions, which are likely to strain part of the political class as well as public opinion.
Special reintroduction of banned insecticides
In question, the addition by the Senate, in committee, of a section relating to pesticides, with the exceptional and regulated reintroduction of two phytosanitary products, acetamiprid and flupyradifurone, insecticides banned in France but authorized elsewhere in Europe.
Measures resurrected from the previous Duplomb law, named after the farmer senator LR from Haute-Loire who is one of the rapporteurs of the emergency law in the Senate. Censored by the Constitutional Council last year after several weeks of very strong mobilization by their opponents, these measures have been reworked by their authors to pass the filter of the Sages, they hope.
On the other side of the hemicycle, the left is crying “pro-pesticide overbidding”, relaying the concerns of environmental defense associations outraged at the prospect of seeing the reintroduced acetamiprid, a product toxic to biodiversity and potentially to human health.
The government will make an amendment to remove these derogatory provisions, which greatly irritate the Minister of Ecological Transition Monique Barbut, who is totally opposed. Her colleague Annie Genevard, Minister of Agriculture, is more open on a personal level, but she admitted a certain embarrassment.
“The government is not in favor of this development, which runs the risk of heated debates that could compromise the final adoption” of the text, she said. Indeed, if this measure is widely supported on the right and the far right, it risks deeply dividing the central bloc, which is very divided on the issue.
For Senator LR Pierre Cuypers, it is on the contrary “the only solution for certain sectors in danger” such as beets or hazelnuts, he insisted in committee.
Discussions around the water component
But there are numerous irritants elsewhere in the text. “We must be careful that acetamiprid is not the tree that hides the forest,” warns socialist Jean-Claude Tissot, denouncing “several very significant setbacks that will have to be fought.”
Firstly, a dense section on water, which will be discussed after an exceptional heatwave. It plans to ease the environmental obligations underlying the construction of storage facilities, and the Senate plans to strengthen it.
Another much-discussed part of the text, the means offered to breeders to protect themselves from wolves, with the removal of prior authorization required to carry out defensive shots during attacks on all herds.
On these two aspects, Monique Barbut did not hide her discomfort with the evolution of the debates: if the initial text suited her, it now includes “setbacks” which “cannot be acceptable”.
The government will make amendments to remove several of these additions. In total, some 1,000 amendments were tabled, presaging lengthy debates. After the Senate vote, a joint committee (CMP), a meeting of deputies and senators, must meet in mid-July to arrive at a common text. Given the divergences, this already looks very uncertain.
