From January 1, minimum distances for spreading pesticides from homes must be respected: between 5 and 10 meters depending on the type of crop, and up to 20 meters in the event of the use of dangerous products.
From 1er January 2020, farmers will have to respect a safety zone between pesticide application areas and homes, a government source said on Friday, December 20.
This minimum distance, which will be fixed by decree in the coming days, establishes a distance of 5 meters for low crops such as cereals and crops. It will be 10 meters for vines or tree crops and can reach 20 meters – an “incompressible distance” – for the most dangerous products whose “toxicity is almost proven for humans”.
However, a decree published at the same time as the decree provides for the possibility of reducing these safety zones: they will increase to five meters for arboriculture and to three meters for vines and other crops if the farmer acquires ” the most efficient spraying equipment from an environmental point of view”.
“With this system, France becomes one of the first European countries to adopt a national framework for the protection of residents living near agricultural crops”, welcomed the Minister for Ecological and Inclusive Transition, Elisabeth Borne.
Environmental NGOs worried
An opinion far from being shared by associations for the defense of the environment, which criticize the government for having established distances “very insufficient to protect the health of the populations”. For François Veillerette, director of the NGO Future Generations, “the so-called safety distances retained are inconsistent”. “Ten meters or nothing, it turns out to be the same. There is a flagrant disregard for the families exposed and who cannot protect themselves from the dangers of pesticides”, he declared to the World.
Environmental NGOs also deplore that the limitation of spreading to 20 meters from dwellings for dangerous products concerns only a tiny part of the authorized phytosanitary products, which do not include either glyphosate or SDIH fungicides.
Finally, they regret that the executive’s decision comes without taking into consideration the public consultation opened in September by the Ministry of Ecological and Inclusive Transition, which collected more than 53,000 contributions in less than a month. . The results, demanded “urgently” by the Nicolas Hulot Foundation, France Nature Environnement, Future Generations, Association Santé Environnement France and Physicians’ Alert on pesticides, will be published at the same time as the decree.
A criticism swept away by the Ministry of Ecological Transition, which indicated that the results of the consultation had led to “very antagonistic positions” between residents and farmers and that the decree constituted “a framework for good cohabitation” between them .
Proven air and soil pollution
This controversial government decision comes as Atmo France has just published a disturbing report, result of 15 years of analyzes carried out by the Federation of Approved Air Quality Monitoring Associations (Aasqa) and showing that the air we breathe in France is loaded with fine particles and toxic gases, but also with 40 to 90 pesticides. Among the most common found on the sampling sites, there are four herbicides and two insecticides, including one already banned, and three fungicides.
These products “are always in the ground, since they are persistent. And by various weather phenomena, for example by the wind, by the resuspension of particles, we can still find them in the air”, explains Charlotte Lepitre, coordinator of the Atmo France health network, quoted by France info.
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