Briefings

The European Union has agreed to reform EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and, as part of that, Member States (MS) need to prepare National Strategic Plans (NSP) by end of 2021. The European Commission is currently reading and commenting on the plans.

The European Commission has published an Inception Impact Assessment to inform citizens and stakeholders about the Commission's plans to move EU towards development of Sustainable Food Systems aiming at allowing citizens to provide feedback on the intended initiative and to participate effectively in future consultation activities.

Today, PAN Europe and PAN International are calling on the WHO and the OECD, via a letter, to reject and condemn EFSA's methodology to assess cocktail effects of pesticides. Salomé Roynel, Campaigner at PAN Europe commented: “In this letter we argue, based on our work, that EFSA's methodology is inherently biased.

Technical guidance on points 3.6.3 to 3.6.5, and 3.8.2 of Annex II to Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009, in particular regarding the demonstration of negligible exposure to an active substance in a plant protection product under realistic conditions of use.

The protection of EU citizens from pesticide cocktail effects, a legal and political commitment of the EU. EU citizens and the environment are continuously exposed to many different combinations of chemicals, including pesticide formulations, both in indoor and outdoor environments (food, water, air, etc.). On their own, synthetic pesticide formulations (or plant protection products) already raise significant concerns.

The European Commission has published a proposal for amending Regulation (EC) No 1185/2009 concerning statistics on pesticides. All that is being proposed is an upgrading of the list of active substances. The European Commission is neither using this opportunity to upgrade pesticide use statistics nor to challenge Member States on the ways current pesticide statistics are collected and released. PAN Europe proposes to significantly improve the legislative proposal as follows.

The European Commission has published a proposal for a regulation (COM(2021) 37 final) regarding European statistic for agricultural products and inputs (SAIO). This proposal aims at replacing inter alia Regulation (EC) No 1185/2009 concerning statistics on pesticides. Below, you can find PAN Europe’s comments regarding the public consultation: We welcome the proposal to make Member States accountable in relation to pesticide statistics.

Pesticide Action Network Europe (PAN) Europe welcomes the opportunity to comment on the inception Impact Assessments of the EU’s agricultural promotion policy (1), providing our views on the Commission's understanding of the problem and possible solutions and be allowed to provide relevant information, including on the possible impacts of different options.

As part of the European Green Deal’s strategies (Farm to Fork and Biodiversity), the European Commission is proposing to reduce pesticide risk and use by 50% by 2030. While PAN Europe fully backs the Commission in setting reduction targets for pesticides, we completely disagree with the indicator that the European Commission is proposing to measure this reduction. In the following we explain why.

The European Commission's REFIT evaluation of the Pesticide and MRL Regulations[1] recognises the important value of the Pesticides Regulation that aims “to ensure a high level of protection for humans, animal and the environment” and sets clear hazard-based cut-off criteria for the approval of active substances. Nevertheless, the evaluation falls short in identifying several important shortcomings of the current pesticide authorisation system – raised by civil society, scientists and policy makers- that obstruct the Regulation to fulfil its purpose.