Pesticide ban hammers French sugar beet harvest

Parliament has approved letting beet farmers again use neonicotinoid pesticides in a bid to save the industry and its 45,000 jobs -- France is the world's second-largest producer of the crop, after Russia.

But the government has not yet officially published the measure, leaving agrochemical groups racing to supply seeds treated with pesticides before next year's planting season.

In the meantime, overall French production will likely fall to 27.4 million tons this year, the lowest in over 30 years, said Franck Sanders of the CGB beet growers' association.

Average yields stood at 65 tons per hectare, a 30 percent plunge from the previous year.

"It's a financial catastrophe for growers... a year even more disastrous than we could imagine," Sanders said.

He called on the government to increase compensation, currently limited to 20,000 euros ($24,000) every three years.

Without access to neonicotinoids, outlawed in France since 2018, growers say they were especially vulnerable to aphids, small insects that cause beet leaves to turn yellow and severely crimp yields.

Neonicotinoids, among the most commonly used insecticides in the world, are based on the chemical structure of nicotine and attack insects' nervous systems.

Many experts say the pesticides are decimating populations of crop-pollinating bees, causing "colony collapses" that could have dire consequences for biodiversity.

Those fears prompted France's government to re-authorise the use of five neonicotinoids by beet growers until 2023, a measure likely to come into effect this month.

The move infuriated the environmental activists who had pushed for the ban, which goes further than a European Union clampdown on three main neonicotinoids.