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French Senate passes watered-down biodiversity bill

The French Senate on Thursday night passed the government's biodiversity law but only after watering down some of its key proposals, including a tax on palm oil that had aroused protests from Indonesia and the use of pesticides believed to harm bees. Green campaigners claimed lobbies had sabotaged the bill.

Pesticide spraying at Villefranche-de-Lauragais, south of France
Pesticide spraying at Villefranche-de-Lauragais, south of France AFP
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The Senate's right-wing majority passed the bill on a second reading but in such a changed form that the ruling Socialists abstained.

The Greens, the hard left, 21 right-wingers and centrist former sport minister Chantal Jouanno voted against.

Junior environment minister Barbara Pompili pointed out that the first draft agreed by the Senate was much tougher.

"I regret that we are still talking about considerations that I thought were behind us," she commented.

The Green party EELV's leader in the Senate, Ronan Dantec, claimed that "the chemical, agribusiness, hunting and cement lobbies used all their weight to stop any reconquest of the protection of biodiversity".

Supporters of the law in its amended form praised its etablishment of a right to compensation for environmental damage and call for the phasing out of neonicotinoid pesticides, whose use has been linked to declines in populations of insects, notably bees.

Neocotinoid deadline, Nutella tax scrapped

The provision on neonicotinoids was one of the points of discord, however, since the Senate removed a deadline for the complete end of the use of certain types by September 2018.

Another change was the scrapping of the "Nutella tax" on products containing palm oil, whose cultivation in south-east Asia has led to the destruction of large swathes of rainforest.

The proposed tax aroused opposition in France, partly because it is used in the popular chocolate spread, and the Indonesian and Malaysian governments lobbied against it, claiming that it would ruin small farmers.

The lower house of parliament reacted by drastically reducing it but the Senate, which actually inserted it into the original bill, took it out again, arguing that it could breach World Trade Organisation rules.

Although disappointed by the changes, green NGOs welcomed some of the bill's provisions, in particular a ban on patents on native seeds and other organic matter.

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