France’s National Assembly narrowly passed a total ban on neonicotinoids, a class of pesticides that has been implicated in the Colony Collapse Disorder that has devastated honeybee populations, says Reuters. The ban still has to be approved by the French Senate and then return to the National Assembly for a final vote later this year.
France’s environment minister, Ségolène Royal, pushed for the ban. “This decision will prepare us for the future and protect bees and the role they play,” she said in a statement. “Research and development of substitute products has to accelerate.”
France’s ban, if it becomes law, would go beyond regulations set out by the European Union, which suspended the use of three neonicotinoids in 2013, says Reuters. (The UK temporarily lifted those restrictions during the summer of 2015, arguing that farmers would lose their crops otherwise.)
France’s agricultural minister, Stéphane Le Foll, and many of the country’s farm groups worry that a ban will make France—the continent’s biggest crop producer—less competitive. Le Foll has instead called for a plan to halve pesticide use, but he has delayed his own deadline for that goal by seven years. Wet weather, he says, has given farmers no choice but to spray more heavily.
In a statement about the French ban, the pesticide maker Bayer said, “Some [French] farmers are going to find themselves in a dead-end regarding crop protection … and could see their harvests fall by 15 to 40 percent depending on the crop.”
A 2015 report by the UK firm Rural Business Research said that restricted use of neonics has cost European farmers $33 million in crop losses, replanting costs and more expensive chemical alternatives. But the profits generated by pollinators — and lost in the case of their disappearance — arguably offsets the economic impact of a neonic ban. In the 2009 season alone, Colony Collapse Disorder is estimated to have cost American farmers $8-12 billion. And globally, insect pollinators are responsible for somewhere between €22.8-57 billion in farm profits, according a 2010 United Nations report.