The French senate backed a bill on Tuesday that lets France’s food and environmental safety agency, Anses, grant waivers for two pesticides scientists say can poison bees. The vote, 214 to 111, gives acetamiprid and flupyradifurone a route back into French fields under “exceptional circumstances” and in struggling farm sectors. The state has picked its side. Again.
Brussels Rules, Paris Enforces
The pesticides are already allowed in the EU but banned in France. That detail matters. It shows the familiar European arrangement: the continental market sets the pressure, national institutions absorb the fallout, and the people who live with the damage are told this is just how competitiveness works. The law will allow the chemicals to be used against aphid-borne diseases that can ruin crops of sugar beet, apples, hazelnuts and cherries, while producers say they can no longer compete with European rivals.
Scientific studies have established that acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid with powerful neurotoxic effects, can poison bees, affecting their foraging capacity and memory. A 2024 study suggested flupyradifurone could be lethal to some honeybees. Yet the bill sailed through the legislative process after the proposal was inserted late, specifically to help ensure it cleared the right-leaning upper house. That’s the machinery in plain view: corporate agriculture, parliamentary arithmetic, and a safety agency asked to dress up waivers as restraint.
Beekeepers and environmentalists reacted furiously. Carolyn Bouguet, a beekeeper in Essonne, greater Paris, said, “There are no words to describe the frustration.” She added that bee populations had already been “badly compromised by climate change, new parasites and loss of habitat.” Henri Clément, a beekeeper in the southern Lozère department and spokesperson for the French beekeeping association, UNAF, called the measure “an absolute disaster for our sector, and for biodiversity as a whole.” He said the risk for bees was “very high mortality rates and reduced harvests.”
Who Pays for ‘Solutions’
France’s largest farmers’ union, the FNSEA, welcomed the bill as “a major milestone and a victory for French farmers.” Agriculture minister Annie Genevard called it “real and tangible solutions” for growers. The language is neat. The reality is harsher. Genevard said the health agency would only allow the pesticides’ use in certain areas for limited periods and when there was “no impact on human health or the environment, an emergency situation … and no alternative.” That promise sits beside the scientific warnings and the record of what happened when neonicotinoids were introduced in France in the mid-1990s.
According to agriculture ministry figures, honey production in France halved between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s, although habitat loss and climate breakdown were also contributing factors. Yves Delaunay, a beekeeper from the western Vendée department, said his honey production “went from 80kg per hive to 5kg” after neonicotinoids were introduced. He said the colonies “collapsed.” “In just a few days, we went from 70,000 bees to 20,000,” he told local media. “They were disoriented, unable to return to the hive. We found them dead everywhere. It was a huge loss.”
Christian Pons, the UNAF president, cut through the official rhetoric. The law, he said, “claims to defend French food sovereignty, but since when is it acceptable to destroy one sector – that of beekeepers – in order to save another, for example that of hazelnut trees?” That’s the state’s version of sovereignty: one sector sacrificed so another can keep feeding the market.
Greenpeace France said the country’s centrist government and its rightwing allies in parliament were “trampling on science, health, the environment and the clear will of the people.” It called the legislation “deeply concerning” and “a disgrace.” Monique Barbut, France’s environment minister, said the law was “one environmental setback too many” and submitted her resignation on Wednesday. She later stayed on after meeting President Emmanuel Macron, who gave her “guarantees” on climate action goals.
Barbut, who previously headed the conservation charity WWF France, said she had sought to defend “the silence of our forests, the quality of our water, the purity of our air, the richness of our soils and the diversity of life.” She said she was resigning because “the forces opposing these goals have become so powerful that I can no longer carry this ambition through.” The sentence writes itself.
The French parliament passed a bill reauthorising acetamiprid last year despite a petition against it that gathered more than 2m signatures. The constitutional council annulled that bill, saying it did not abide by France’s environmental charter. Now the beekeeping union, environmental groups and left-leaning members of parliament say they will refer the new law to the constitutional council again, arguing it fails to provide adequate safeguards for human health and the environment. The electoral circus rolls on. The bees keep dying.