For decades, French farmers sprayed pesticides they were told were harmless. Many have since fallen ill, grappling with cancers and other diseases caused by exposure. As the EU prepares to vote on a package that would end regular safety reviews of most pesticides, victims, doctors and scientists warn it could keep harmful products on the market for longer.

For most of his life, José Nadan worked as a professional beekeeper in Morbihan, a coastal area in Brittany known for its medieval towns and fresh seafood. At the start of his career, he recalls a golden age of beekeeping, when each year, and “without much effort”, the number of hives would naturally increase.

But things took a turn for the worse in the 1980s, when the varroa mite made its way to France. A parasite, the mite weakens bees by suppressing their immune system and spreading deadly viruses that can collapse entire colonies. “We improvised trying to kill them with whatever we had until official products made their way onto the market,” Nadan recalls.

Nadan also spent many years keeping an orchard of cider apple trees he treated with a pesticide that, he was told, was organic and had no effect on humans. “The sales reps even said it was so safe you could drink it,” the 69-year-old says. “I never took the slightest precaution, spraying from my tractor as I drove along the rows of trees,” Nadan recalls. “Sometimes, because of the wind, I’d get some on my face. But I wasn’t worried.”“I later found out it was a product like Roundup [a Monsanto weed killer] and contained glyphosate,” he says, a substance now known to be harmful to human health.

It was only after he retired that Nadan realised the consequences of being exposed to pesticides for all those years. Six years ago, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

His illness has officially been recognised as an occupational hazard caused by pesticides by France’s agricultural social security system.

In everything, everywhere, all at once Pesticides are known to cause a range of health issues, including various types of cancer, respiratory diseases, neurodegenerative illnesses like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer's, cardiovascular diseases and infertility. They also impact children more than adults, leading to developmental delays and cognitive impairments.

And they are everywhere. A 2023 study in which hundreds of samples were gathered from different environments across 10 European countries found that pesticides were present in 100% of air, indoor dust and water samples.

Edmond Leduc, a retired doctor living close to the Belgian border in northern France, has lived next to crop fields treated with pesticides for 44 years. “The farmers working the fields practise intensive farming, so there is always a harvest,” he says. “When it’s potato season, they sometimes spray fungicides every two weeks.”

A lover of gardening, Leduc spent a lot of time outside and admits “not being very careful” in the early years. “I didn’t know the products I was inhaling were toxic.”Leduc discovered he had lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, in 2018, and was diagnosed with prostate cancer in August of this year – two conditions linked to pesticides.

As one of Europe’s biggest agricultural producers, France is also one of its largest consumers of pesticides. And the number of requests by agricultural workers like Nadan, who are in close contact with the toxic substances, has shot up from 318 in 2024 to 975 in 2025.

Yet as the toll of pesticide exposure is becoming clearer, the EU is preparing to vote on a set of legal amendments that could make it harder to ban these harmful products.

The EU’s ‘safety lock’ at risk Despite having a multi-layered system to assess the risk of pesticides, Europe still sees cases where they cause harm to both the environment and humans. Unlike the US, which uses a risk-based model that factors actual levels of exposure, the EU uses a hazard-based model, meaning it focuses on the inherent toxicological properties of a certain chemical before it’s approved.

But regulatory assessments are often delayed and take time, slowing down the process for pesticides to enter the market. To speed things up and cut red tape, the European Commission proposed a legislative package that would overhaul the current system. Known as Omnibus X, it would amend ten existing EU laws that cover pesticides, biocides, food residues, animal feed and official controls.

A key amendment aims to scrap the periodic re-evaluation of pesticides, which often end up causing greater damage than expected after being initially approved.

The EU ensures the move would have “no compromise on food safety or environmental protection”, but critics of the package disagree.

“New scientific findings need to be taken into account regularly, because there is always a level of uncertainty [about the risk of a pesticide] before it hits the market,” says ecotoxicologist Martina Vijver, who was up in arms when news of the package dropped. “A periodic review is a safety lock, it’s crucial, because we can’t foresee every consequence.”An insecticide known as chlorpyrifos, for example, was approved for use in the EU back in 2006. Sprayed on crops to control pests or on grains stored in warehouses, the chemical came to be one of the most commonly used pesticides in Europe. Residues of the substance were found in fruit, vegetables, dairy products and drinking water.

When its approval came up for renewal, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reviewed the evidence and decided in 2019 that no safe exposure level could be set, and that chlorpyrifos didn’t meet the EU’s health requirements. Even in small doses, chlorpyrifos affects the human body’s neurological, reproductive, metabolic and immune systems. The substance was linked to neurodevelopmental disorders in children, including autism.

Even though the entire regulatory process spanned over seven years, once the ruling passed in January 2020, Member States had three months to dispose of all products containing chlorpyrifos.

“All pesticides are aimed at killing something,” Vijver explains. “If a substance is neurotoxic for insects, for example, that same neurotoxicity could apply to humans [...] Which is not so strange, because that’s the intention [of the pesticide].”

Denis Benoit, a former farmer in charge of pruning trees in the winter and applying pesticides from spring through summer, recalls going home with intense symptoms after a day’s work. “I had a fever at night and red patches on my arms,” he says. “It was because of the insecticides we were using, like D6.”Like Nadan and Leduc, the 65-year-old from western France was also diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2019. “I do feel regret for having worked with those substances, but it was hard to find work at the time, and we were told they were only toxic in large doses,” he says. ‘Who sounds the alarm?’

For scientists like Vijver, the regular reassessment of pesticides is one of the few safeguards against such long-hidden harms, and it is precisely what the EU’s upcoming omnibus would remove.

Under the current EU system, a pesticide’s approval expires on a set date, and the company producing it has to show again that its product is safe to keep selling. If the approval no longer expires automatically, the product would stay on the market by default, removing the “safety lock” that Vijver refers to. The burden would then fall on the shoulders of regulators such as the EFSA or individual member states to sound the alarm.

“But who triggers the process? Doctors? Scientists? Or the guy who walks his dog and sees all the birds have died? That’s not our job,” says Vijver.

If passed, the legislation package would also increase the maximum grace period for farmers to substitute banned pesticides from 18 months to three years. Conditions for the exceptional use of banned pesticides, including endocrine disruptors, would also be loosened.

Sending a clear message of concern, Vijver took the initiative to write an open letter on September 17 and urged the European Parliament to pause the vote on the legislative package until an independent investigation into its potential health and environmental impacts is carried out. She gathered 573 other signatories from a wide range of disciplines, including environmental protection, medicine and public health – all of whom “have expertise” in the field, Vijver says.

“I’ve never done something like this before,” she admits. “As scientists, we are really worried. I would never have done this if I wasn’t really worried.”The vote on Omnibus X is expected to take place at the end of October.

Victims take to the streets Cancer victims and farmers marched arm in arm last weekend, flanked by doctors and activists, to protest pesticides. Organised by a handful of non-profits, the march saw 8,000 demonstrators gather outside a factory in northern France owned by Syngenta, the world’s largest pesticide seller.

Amid the crowd was Fleur Breteau, founder of the Cancer Colère collective, who made waves last year when she sparked a nationwide movement to block the reintroduction of the pesticide acetamiprid.

Though the reintroduction of acetamiprid was eventually banned last summer, France passed an agricultural law in August this year that would partially reverse the decision.

Holding a placard that read: “Morgan, dead age 36, breast cancer,” Breteau told French daily Le Monde on October 3 that Morgan was her partner on agricultural issues and had passed away in June. “We’re losing peers every week,” she said.

“When I see the state of some of my fellow retirees, how sick and tired they are, I tell myself that all things considered, I am not doing too bad,” says former beekeeper Nadan, who now helps other agricultural workers as a member of a collective to support pesticide victims.

“I went to the funeral of a crop technician I was helping last week. He would go from farm to farm and survey treated fields, and fell ill shortly after retiring,” Nadan says. “He had a form of Parkinson’s that meant he could barely speak and was in a wheelchair. The disease progressed so rapidly that he didn’t have time to finalise his request to have the illness officially recognised as being caused by pesticides.”For campaigners, cases like this are a stark reminder of what is at stake as Brussels prepares to rewrite its pesticide rules.

French environmental organisation Générations Futures has organised a weekend of protests and canvassing across the country, aimed at informing people about the EU legislative package that could loosen restrictions on pesticides.

“It’s never easy to bring EU issues into the public sphere because they aren’t very enticing. Our aim this weekend is to inform people about the Omnibus, spark debate, get people talking, which is definitely something its supporters want to avoid,” says Andy Battentier, campaign manager for Générations Futures.

“A third of the European Parliament is made up of right-wing and far-right MEPs, who favour scrapping standards [red tape],” says Battentier on the chances the legislative package will pass.

A first-ever “presidential debate” on pesticides organised by the NGO will also take place in Cambrai, northern France, this Saturday, with leftist representatives of presidential candidates for the 2027 election saying they will attend. Three hundred doctors in France have been awaiting a response from former prime minister Gabriel Attal, centre-right Edouard Philippe and Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau to debate “this major public health issue” – but their seats are likely to remain empty.

“23 million people in France suffer from either a chronic illness or cancer,” the doctors wrote in the letter sent on September 28. “Numerous studies have shown a strong link between these conditions and pesticides. As doctors, we work tirelessly to protect the health of our fellow citizens. What is the point of our efforts if we don’t tackle the root cause of the diseases?”Back in Morbihan, Nadan still thinks about the bees he fought to save from the varroa mite, which weakens its host so slowly that by the time the damage shows, the colony is often beyond saving. Decades later, he and his fellow farmers fear the same may be true of the products they were told would protect them.

“Many farmers feel a sense of shame, especially because they have children who work in conventional farming,” he says, fearing the Omnibus would only “fuel the surge in cancers and other degenerative diseases” for generations to come.