Loopholes in France’s pesticide export ban allow growing shipments of toxic chemicals

Multinational companies are exporting rising quantities of banned chemicals from France to be used in pesticide production overseas, after the French government failed to act on its promise to end this practice. 

A new investigation by Unearthed and Public Eye reveals how the pesticide industry is exploiting France’s failure to close a loophole in its landmark ban on the export of pesticides that are prohibited for use on its own farms. 

Last year, French authorities approved the export of more than 4,500 tonnes of undiluted banned chemicals for use in pesticide manufacture, up from around 3,400 tonnes in 2022.

Two-thirds of these exports were destined for Brazil – arguably the country with the most important reserves of biodiversity on earth. They included vast quantities of picoxystrobin – a fungicide banned in Europe over threats to wildlife and concerns that its residues could damage human DNA – and the bee-killing insecticide fipronil, which has been linked to the recent poisoning of thousands of hives in Brazil. 

These exports were approved despite France’s position as the first country in the world to pass a law against the export of pesticides banned because of the risks they pose to human health or the environment. Loopholes in this law, which is known as the loi Egalim, have left French factories free to continue exporting large amounts of banned pesticides, mainly to the global South. 

When this was first revealed by an Unearthed and Public Eye investigation, in December 2022, the French government promised to close the loopholes. In particular, the then-environment minister Christophe Béchu promised to close a “gap” dubbed the “pure substance loophole”: this was that the Egalim law had only prohibited the export of pesticides containing banned chemicals, and not the export of those active ingredients themselves. 

This left companies free to continue shipping these dangerous and banned chemicals in their undiluted form, to be mixed into shop-ready products overseas. 

“We prohibited the export of products without specifying that this [also] applied to the active substances, and we’ve got companies taking advantage of this,” Béchu told the French parliament.

“We have to correct this, to amend it, because the legislature’s intention was not to allow this gap,” he said.

However, in the 21 months since this promise, France has not closed the loophole, and has taken no public steps towards doing so.

“It’s shameful that poisons banned in France continue to be produced and exported from our soil, more than four years after the ban was passed,” said Delphine Batho, a politician in the Social and Ecologist group in the French parliament. “Agrochemical companies are exploiting a legal loophole, but they can also count on the benevolence of the government, which has done nothing to remedy the situation.”

A ‘public health scandal’

Last year Batho, a former environment minister who now serves as a deputy in France’s National Assembly, tabled a bill intended to close the loopholes in France’s export ban – including the pure substance loophole. She told Unearthed and Public Eye she had recently retabled this bill, following July’s National Assembly elections. 

Nicolas Thierry, a Social and Ecologist group deputy in the French parliament who challenged the government when the gaps in the law were first revealed, said the “public health scandal” of these exports had now been “compounded by the failure of a government that made a commitment before the National Assembly to plug the legal loopholes”.

France’s Ministry for Ecological Transition declined to respond directly when asked by Unearthed and Public Eye if the government still planned to close the pure substance loophole. Instead, a ministry spokesperson indicated that France supported an initiative – which began under the last European Commission – to introduce an EU-wide ban on the export of chemicals that are banned from use inside the European Union. 

This “would make it possible to extend the French ban on the export of plant protection products containing banned substances to the European level, and in particular to guarantee fair competition between all EU member states and better functioning of the European Union’s internal market,” the spokesperson said.

The pure substance loophole was not the only gap in the Egalim law that pesticide companies made use of last year. In total, France approved the export of 7,294 tonnes of banned pesticides in 2023, a slight drop compared with the previous year. 

However, of these exports, 4,517 tonnes, or 62%, were pure substances. This represented a sharp increase from 2022, when less than half of the exports were pure substances.

Other shipments were permitted under a different loophole, which stated that the Egalim law did not immediately apply in cases where a pesticide’s approval for use in the EU had been allowed to expire without the products being formally banned. However, that loophole was closed in March this year after a legal challenge by a campaign group. 

The government had previously consulted on plans to close this “unsupported substances” loophole, but these plans were rendered unnecessary by the court ruling, the Ministry for Ecological Transition’s spokesperson said.

Two companies

The main beneficiaries of France’s pure substance loophole are two foreign corporations – the American agrochemical giant Corteva, and its German competitor BASF, the data obtained by Unearthed and Public Eye shows. 

Between them, these two companies accounted for 97% of the undiluted banned chemicals exported for pesticide manufacture last year. 

Corteva was the biggest exporter by weight, receiving approval to ship 3,044 tonnes of the pesticide picoxystrobin. That would be enough to make more than 15,000 tonnes of the company’s bestselling fungicide Approach Prima, and in turn to spray more than 50 million hectares of soya bean fields – an area almost the size of France. 

Picoxystrobin was banned in Europe and the UK in 2017, due to concern about its potential to damage human chromosomes, as well as the “high risk” it posed to aquatic life, earthworms and the mammals that ate them. 

Corteva’s exports of this chemical from France last year were destined for eight countries, including Argentina, India, and the United States. But the majority – 2,000 tonnes – was for Brazil. 

Unearthed contacted Corteva for this article, but the company did not respond.

‘Absurdly huge environmental damage’

BASF was the second-largest exporter by weight, receiving approval to ship 1,311 tonnes of pure fipronil, a chemical that has been linked to massive bee die-offs across the world. Similarly to Corteva, more than three quarters of BASF’s approved exports went to Brazil. 

Brazil’s enormous agribusinesses have made it the world’s most important market for highly hazardous pesticides. Authorities in the country have documented multiple cases of bee colonies being accidentally poisoned with fipronil. 

A spokesperson for BASF said the company’s “understanding from the evidence available” was that the products which caused these poisonings were “not produced or sold by BASF”, and that the deaths resulted from the “misuse” of sprays directed at the leaves of plants, which BASF does not sell. 

Various companies market fipronil-based insecticides in Brazil, but the products BASF sells in the country are used to treat seeds, or applied to the soil. These uses of fipronil are also prohibited in the EU. 

While there is no national figure for the number of bees killed by exposure to this chemical, beekeepers and academics told Unearthed it was the main pesticide involved in Brazil’s reported cases of colony poisonings.  

Rodrigo Zaluski, a researcher at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, has analysed data from around a dozen surveys in which scientists tested bees from hives suspected of having been poisoned by pesticides. The earliest deaths investigated were in 2014, the most recent in 2023. In every major survey he analysed, fipronil was detected in a majority of cases. 

Last year, the southern state of São Paulo alone received 54 reports of massive bee die-offs – representing 2,717 hives. Officials tested bees from 47 of these die-offs, and found fipronil present in two-thirds of cases. 

The number of reported bee poisonings in São Paulo significantly understates the true toll, according to Renata Taviera, manager of the state’s bee health programme. “The beekeepers don’t report all the cases to the investigative body,” she explained. “And when they do report, it’s not always possible to get samples and test them.”

Ricardo Orsi, a member of the national scientific committee of the Brazilian Beekeeping Confederation, estimates that 70% of the registered cases of bee poisonings in the country are caused by fipronil. 

However, almost all of these reported deaths are honeybees from commercial apiaries. There is no way to track the impact pesticides are having on wild native bees that can be more sensitive to pesticides, Orsi told Unearthed. 

“If we are killing honeybees, then the native bees, the butterflies and other insects are dead too,” he added. “It’s an absurdly huge environmental damage that we can’t even measure.”

Now, authorities in Brazil are starting to clamp down on some uses of fipronil. Last December the country’s national environment agency, Ibama, temporarily suspended all spraying of fipronil from planes and helicopters, as well as from tractor-mounted devices that spray the pesticide indiscriminately across large areas. 

“Investigations already carried out indicate the potential existence of an unacceptable environmental risk to bees,” the agency explained at the time. The suspension will be in force while the agency reevaluates the pesticide’s environmental impact. 

However, farmers are still allowed to use seeds treated with fipronil, to apply the chemical directly to the soil, and to spray it in a targeted way on areas of the crop where pests are present. 

Even before the national suspension, some Brazilian states had already banned foliar spraying of fipronil. Santa Catarina was the first, in 2021, after finding fipronil in every sample taken from 300 hives of dead bees. 

“After the ban, we saw a great decrease in the deaths of bees,” said Ivanir Cella, the former president of the Santa Catarina Beekeepers Federation. “I would say we reduced 70% of the problem.”

A spokesperson for BASF said the reports of significant bee deaths linked to fipronil were “of great concern to us, particularly the number of reports of bee deaths in Brazil over recent years, given how significant Brazil is for food security and biodiversity globally”. 

“We are aware of the controversial discussions on the possible impact of fipronil on bees, pollinators and other beneficial insects,” he told Unearthed. “That is why we have already thoroughly reviewed our portfolio and market no fipronil products for applications like aerial or over-the-top foliar spraying that bear a higher risk of causing bee incidents.”

He said that in Brazil BASF phased out fipronil-based foliar sprays in 2013. The only fipronil products it now sells in the country are used as seed treatments, or applied to furrows or the surface of the soil.   

“Regarding the recent cases of acute bee deaths in Brazil linked to fipronil, our understanding from the evidence available to us is that the products were not produced or sold by BASF, and resulted from misuse during aerial or foliar application, which is an application we do not sell products for,” he added. “However, we are still concerned by any of these incidents.”

Orsi, however, said the problems caused by fipronil in Brazil could only be fully remedied with a comprehensive ban. 

In recent years he has conducted a number of studies of the impact of fipronil in bees at very small doses. These doses are non-lethal, but produce, he says, “chronic poisoning”. 

“We proved that these minimal doses promote physiological and behavioural effects. It affects the queen bee’s nutrition, leads to a shorter life for the bees, and affects their immune system, so they become more susceptible to disease”, he told Unearthed. 

“The effects of fipronil have been studied and evaluated over the last few years, and we can say that it really is one of the most aggressive [pesticides] for bees”, he added. “The only solution is to forbid the use of fipronil, in order to develop and find molecules that are less harmful to the bees.”

Genotoxic potential

Pure fipronil and picoxystrobin accounted for almost two-thirds of the total weight of France’s banned pesticide exports last year. However, the country also approved shipments of 21 other prohibited agrochemicals, by more than a dozen companies.

A few of these exports were pure substances, but 2,778 tonnes were farm-ready products containing banned chemicals. These included more than 750 tonnes of seeds treated with bee-killing ‘neonicotinoid’ insecticides like clothianidin and thiamethoxam, destined for countries including Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Chile and Turkey.

Many of these exports appear to have been approved under a loophole that was introduced in March 2022, three months after the law came into force. At that time, the French government issued a decree that the export ban would not immediately apply in cases where a pesticide’s EU approval had simply been allowed to expire, without a formal ban. This loophole applied even in cases where the EU authorities themselves considered the pesticide to be banned. 

This decree was annulled in March this year by the State Council, France’s highest court, after a legal challenge by the French NGO Générations Futures. The court found the decree violated the law, because neither French nor European law allowed the government to grant a “grace period” for these “unsupported substances”, a spokesperson for the Ministry for the Ecological Transition told Unearthed and Public Eye.

Since the State Council’s ruling, the export of these chemicals has been considered banned, she added, and the ministry has opposed applications to export seeds coated with “unsupported” chemicals like thiamethoxam or clothianidin. 

However, some products were also notified for export by French companies even though they contained chemicals that had been formally banned by the EU. For example, France issued export notifications for 762 tonnes of products containing the fungicide fenamidone, even though it was banned from use in the EU in 2018 over its “genotoxic potential” and “high potential for groundwater contamination”. 

The ministry spokesperson suggested that France was unable to oppose these exports, because although they were contracted by French companies, the products were stored and exported from other EU territories. This means they are not covered by the Egalim law.

These products, she told Unearthed and Public Eye, “were neither produced nor in circulation on French national territory, so it was not legally possible to oppose these exports”. She added that “extending the French ban to the European level would make it possible to avoid such circumventions”. 

The European Commission made a commitment to end the export of banned hazardous chemicals in 2020, after an investigation by Unearthed and Public Eye found that the bloc issued plans to export more than 81,000 tonnes of banned pesticides in a single year.

Earlier this month, commission representative Almut Bitterhof told MEPs that work on this commitment had “advanced”, but there was a delay following this year’s EU elections, according to a report by the political news website Politico. She added that this work would speed up once the new Commission was in place.