Caught in the midst of the controversy over the proposal to renew the glyphosate licence for a period of ten years, member state representatives and the European Commission made little progress on Thursday 5 October at the plants, animals, food and feed (PAFF) committee meeting to discuss the issue.
According to a Commission source, those member states which had not given a response to the Commission proposal were invited to indicate their position (see EUROPE 11856). The Commission repeated that it would not take any decision to renew without the necessary support from the member states.
The next meeting of the PAFF committee is scheduled for 23 October but “the agenda has not yet been finalised”, said Health and Food Safety spokesperson Anca Paduraru. “We don’t even know if glyphosate will be on the agenda”, she added.
The vote, if it takes place, will be on that date at the earliest. There still remains a possibility that it could be held at the start of November or on 13 December. Time is of the essence: the decision has to be taken six months after publication of the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) opinion – that is to say, by 17 December. The vote absolutely must come before 15 December, therefore.
Despite the calls from several MEPs for member states to postpone the vote while awaiting the outcome of the Parliament hearing into the Monsanto Papers on 11 October, it was already clear that there would be no vote at this stage (see EUROPE 11876 and 11866). Health and Food Safety Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis had already stated several times that the Commission would only put its proposal to the vote by member states once it was assured that the text would win the qualified majority required for it to be approved.
That was clearly not going to happen, if only because Germany, in the middle of discussions on forming a coalition government, has not decided on its position.
France, which announced as early as July that it would vote against the proposal for a ten-year renewal, has recently said that it expected the EU to agree before the end of the year on a plan to phase out the professional use of glyphosate within five years, giving time to find sustainable alternatives to the world’s most used total herbicide (see EUROPE 11869). “Banning it completely without an alternative solution would create economic problems. The question is: how long should an interim solution last, to allow time for alternatives to be found?” a French source said on Thursday 5 October. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang, with Mathieu Bion)