On December 17, 2021, the Marseille Administrative Court of Appeal upheld a lower court ruling which had annulled two marketing authorizations (AAM) issued by the French National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health (ANSES) for "Closer" and "Transform", two products manufactured by Dow Agrosciences (now Corteva).

On November 29, 2019, the Nice Administrative Court, seized by the NGOs Générations futures, Union National de l'Apiculture française and Agir pour l'Environnement of the issue of compliance of these AAMs with the precautionary principle. Dow Agrosciences then applied to have the ruling overturned, arguing that sulfoxaflor was authorized by the European Union, that ANSES had not detected any immediate danger to human health or the environment, and that "no reliable and recent scientific opinion, prior to the date of the disputed decisions, made it possible to contradict the conclusions of ANSES".

The Administrative Court of Appeal held that the precautionary principle, enshrined at national level in Article 5 of the Charter of the Environment, and at European level in Article 1 of Regulation (EC) no. 1107/2009, justified the adoption of restrictive measures where there was "scientific uncertainty as to the risks posed by plant protection products to human or animal health or the environment".

Furthermore, the Court noted that the fact that a substance had been authorized at Community level "does not prevent it from being taken into account, like all the substances used in the composition of such products, when assessing the existence of a risk of serious and irreversible damage to the environment or of damage to the environment likely to cause serious harm to health".

While ANSES has concluded that there is no such risk in this case, the conditions and methods of use for Closer and Transform are not sufficiently clear and precise to guarantee "risk-free use for pollinating insects".