The European Court of Justice on Thursday passed a judgement in line with a decision taken by France earlier to protect bees from harmful pesticides.?
The apex court found that France did not violate any rules by the European Union (EU) in banning certain chemicals that were found to be harmful to bees.
The legal spat evolved between the French Crop Protection Association and France back in 2018. At the time, the French government banned some pesticides belonging to the neonicotinoid group. The chemicals in these pesticides were considered harmful for crop-pollinating bees.
Some of these chemicals were also banned by the EU. But as the EU had banned three of these pesticides in crop fields, France went a step further to ban a total of five pesticides from the group both outdoors and in greenhouses.
The ban was contested by farmers who pointed out that the pesticides are used for protecting sugar beet crops. As mentioned in a report by DW, Farmers say that the crops have been infected by an ˇ°infestation of green aphidsˇ± and that neonicotinoid chemicals are the only solution to it.?
The Crop Protection Association had then contested the decision in court. The association had appealed that the French law was ˇ°incompatible with an EU regulation on the family of chemicalsˇ± as per the report.
Although the French government has since relaxed the decree following pressure from beetroot growers, EUˇŻs top court on Thursday ruled out any incompatibility in the law passed earlier. As per the court, France's initial ban had satisfactorily proven the need to stop a "serious risk to human or animal health or to the environment."
The decision follows a legal battle between the French government and the left-wing and green opposition that resulted in an exemption from the ban for beetroot growers until July 2023 on Tuesday.
First introduced in the mid-1990s, neonicotinoids are lab-synthesized pesticides based on the chemical structure of nicotine. The pesticides are meant to attack the central nervous system of insects.
However, a negative impact of the pesticides was observed in recent years, as they started causing "colony collapse disorder" in bees, a mysterious disease that is ˇ°partly blamed on the use of such chemicals,ˇ± says the report.
Subsequent studies have shown that neonicotinoids harm bee reproduction and foraging. Exposure to the class of pesticides also lowers their immunity to disease.