"We're living in a Trumpian moment": on pesticides, agencies and researchers under surveillance
Hostile to the National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRAE), farmers build a wall in front of the entrance to its headquarters in Paris, in November 2024. JUMEAU ALEXIS/ABACA
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The threat, brandished last March, did not go unnoticed in the hushed world of state agencies. While being questioned by the National Assembly's Committee on Economic Affairs and Sustainable Development, Benoît Vallet, the president of the French Agency for Food, Environmental, and Occupational Health Safety (ANSES), suddenly became serious in front of the deputies: if the agency's independence were to be curtailed, as the version of the Duplomb law then under discussion suggests, he would have no choice but to leave.
The reason for this casus belli ? In addition to the much-maligned reintroduction of acetamiprid, the text provides for the creation of a crop protection advisory board. An entity on which farmers and manufacturers could sit... and thus influence the work of the "police officer of...
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