French Environment Minister to Resign Over Controversial Farm Bill

Full text

PARIS — French Minister of Ecological Transition Monique Barbut plans to step down in protest after lawmakers approved controversial farming legislation that exposed major divisions among President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist supporters.

A member of the minister’s team, granted anonymity to discuss a decision that has not been shared publicly, said that Barbut told Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and her own office she would resign after the bill’s expected passage by the French Senate later Tuesday.

The government’s original draft legislation was intended to address French farmers’ frequent complaints about tightening margins and increasingly difficult production conditions. Two of its provisions — one that temporarily authorizes the use of a currently banned pesticide for nut producers and another that doubles water storage allowances for farmers over the next decade — have turned the legislation into a political lightning rod.

Barbut was against the pesticide and water storage proposals, both of which were added late in the legislative process to ensure the bill’s passage in the conservative-majority Senate. She made her opposition clear over the weekend in an interview published by Sunday newspaper La Tribune Dimanche .

“This government bill, which was intended to address an emergency situation facing our farmers, has — since the Senate’s amendments — significantly altered the policy governing the allocation of water resources in our country,” she said.

Annie Genevard, France’s conservative agriculture minister, directly opposed her colleague at the Ministry of Ecological Transition, warning that “allowing this bill to fail — whether out of ideology, self-interest or fear — would push farmers to the brink of despair,” in an interview with another Sunday publication, Le Journal du Dimanche .

Balancing farming and the environment

The debate over the legislation has highlighted the tensions between calls to protect the environment and efforts to keep French agriculture economically viable.

It has also exposed serious rifts among Macron’s centrists, most notably between Lecornu and Gabriel Attal, the head of Macron’s centrist Renaissance party and a candidate in next year’s presidential election in France.

Attal and Lecornu both supported reintroducing the pesticide in question, acetamiprid, under exceptional circumstances, but in a parliamentary debate Monday night the centrist lawmaker nonetheless expressed frustration that the government allowed the provision to be introduced at such a late stage.

Acetamiprid is a chemical that belongs to a group of insecticides known as neonicotinoids, which are used to kill crop-damaging insects.

In 2018, the European Union banned three neonicotinoids , but not acetamiprid, which has come under scrutiny over its effects on the nervous systems of both bees and humans. Acetamiprid is considered less toxic to bees and breaks down faster in soil than the trio banned by Brussels.

France independently chose to ban acetamiprid in 2020. Farmers’ unions have been trying to lobby for its reintroduction ever since, arguing that having certain chemicals banned in France but allowed elsewhere in the European single market creates unfair market conditions. Last year , French lawmakers passed a bill reauthorizing the use of acetamiprid despite a petition against it netting more than 2 million signatures. The bill was later struck down by France’s constitutional court, which ruled that the exceptions allowing the use of the pesticide were too broad.

“In 2026, it is deeply concerning that some lawmakers continue to disregard the overwhelming scientific evidence on the dangers of neonicotinoids and their impact on water resources,” said in a statement Julien Rivoire, an agriculture campaigner for Greenpeace’s French branch.

Meanwhile, France’s biggest farmers union, the FNSEA, hailed the vote as “a major milestone and a first victory for French farmers” in a post on X .

While less hotly debated, the water supply provision was also controversial. Water storage has become an increasingly fraught issue in France as climate change-induced heat waves and droughts threaten supplies across Europe.

The construction of water reservoirs for farmers led to violent clashes between protesters and police during a 2023 demonstration attended by thousands, including prominent French Green politicians, who felt that the agriculture industry was hoarding water and refusing to adopt less water-intensive farming techniques.