Some warned zoning will backfire, with insects and diseases preying on crops' untreated edges. "It became rare to see a rabbit cross the vineyards or to see swallows."Īgricultural groups complain the proposed buffers unfairly target farmers for using perfectly legal products. "The difference over 14 years was stunning," she said. She now works in a vineyard in Margaux that farms organically, proudly declaring: "We have loads of insects." She spent 14 years working for a Listrac vineyard that sprayed with industrial chemicals, watching with growing alarm as flora and fauna disappeared. "It's to give the impression that something is being done," Bibeyran said. While some environmental campaigners welcome the zones' introduction, many said the proposed distances were ridiculously small. Amid a rising tide of concern and protest in France over the use of legal toxins by its massive and powerful farming industry, President Emmanuel Macron's government is planning the enforced creation of small buffer zones to separate sprayed crops from the people who live and work around them. 7, 2013 file photo shows workers collecting red grapes in the vineyards of the famed Chateau Haut Brion, a Premier Grand Cru des Graves, during the grape harvest season, in Pessac-Leognan, near Bordeaux, southwestern France. It is proposing that crops treated with "the most dangerous substances" be separated from homes, schools and other workplaces by no-spray zones at least 10 meters (33 feet) across. The government this week opened a three-week window of public consultation about its planned regulations that will take effect Jan. I put the kids' games away," Despreaux said in a phone interview, as one of her four young charges, ranging in age from 6 months to 2 ½ years, mewed in the background. "I close all the windows and all the doors. She calls the tractors that rumble amid the vines "mosquitoes," because of their long arms pockmarked with nozzles that spray chemical mists to keep the plants and their valuable grapes healthy and pest-free. People like Corinne Despreaux, a childcare worker who looks after babies and toddlers at her home in the Medoc wine town of Listrac, with vineyards that butt up against her garden. "People call me and say, 'I was on my terrace having lunch and we had to rush inside, the kids were in the swimming pool,'" says the Bordeaux vineyard worker who turned anti-pesticide campaigner after her brother died from liver cancer, a death she suspects was linked to agro-chemicals he sprayed as a wine-industry worker.Īmid rising concerns in France over the widespread use by its powerful farming industry of legal toxins, President Emmanuel Macron's government is planning the enforced creation of small buffer zones to separate sprayed crops from the people who live and work around them.
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