It would be “useful” to shed light on the margins of companies that sell pesticides to farmers, said a parliamentary commission of inquiry in a report released Thursday, suggesting that they make “indecent margins” and should pay more taxes.
The main points of the report were presented last week by its rapporteur, the socialist deputy Dominique Potier. He described “an archetype of a failure of public policies” to free farmers from their dependence on synthetic herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. The full report, nearly 300 pages long, was released Thursday. It makes 26 recommendations, including that of “protecting catchments for the supply of drinking water” by opening in particular the possibility of expropriating an operator to stop the contamination of the resource by pesticide residues.
The report also calls for lifting the veil on the “blind spot” in production costs of farmers’ suppliers: manufacturers of machinery, fertilizers and pesticides. “Everything suggests that, in various ways, this sector is not exempt from indecent margins and opportunity profits,” it is underlined. Requested by AFP, the French organization representing pesticide manufacturers, Phyteis, did not immediately respond. The rapporteur indicates that he went to the Ministry of the Economy in November to gauge the contribution to national taxation of manufacturers of phytosanitary products – including the giants Syngenta, Bayer, Corteva and BASF.
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“The controls (…) left me speechless: paying 110 million euros in corporate tax for 2.4 billion euros in turnover implies either very low profitability or a transfer of massive costs [a practice aimed at reducing the tax base, Editor’s note]. I will let you imagine the hypothesis which is mine,” he declared to the other members of the commission, according to a report annexed to the report. “In addition, half of these taxes are recovered [by companies] in the form of research tax credits (CIR) whose use is not oriented – we do not know whether it will be devoted to questionable molecules or really interesting from a technoscientific point of view,” added the MP for Meurthe-et-Moselle. “We can still wonder about the profit margins and taxation of the large groups which carry out 90% of the phytopharmaceutical trade in our country, when we see that they ultimately only pay a little less than 60 million corporate taxes,” he insisted.
