While EU legislation aims to reduce the use of chemical pesticides and the risks associated with their use, the efforts made by the Commission and Member States are insufficient to achieve this goal, according to a report by the Court of Auditors published on Wednesday 5 February.
The audit objective was to assess the adequacy of EU action to implement the 2009 EU Directive on the sustainable use of pesticides (2009/128/EC), which aims to protect public health and the environment through the integrated pest management of crops. This practice consists of using pesticides only if prevention and other methods fail or are ineffective.
The conclusions are rather harsh. According to the auditors, several Member States have been late in implementing the Directive and have not fully transposed it. Incentives for farmers to adopt alternative methods remain weak, since the application of Integrated Pest Management principles is not a condition for receiving Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments. Furthermore, the European Commission is not in a position to control the effects or risks resulting from the use of pesticides.
The Court of Auditors therefore recommends that the Commission should: - ensure that Member States translate the general principles of Integrated Pest Management into practical criteria and verify compliance at farm level, which would allow for them to be linked to post-2020 CAP payments; - improve, when revising legislation, the production of statistical data on pesticides in order to make them more accessible, useful and comparable; - improve progress towards policy objectives; - improve or develop new harmonised risk indicators that would take into account pesticide use.
Member States are required to lay down rules on penalties for infringements of the rules, but in the three countries visited (France, Netherlands, Lithuania), only the Netherlands had defined penalties related to Integrated Pest Management, the auditors pointed out. Although France has taken steps to implement the Directive, including promoting integrated pest management, the requirements have not been transposed into national law.
Even though since 2016 the Commission has taken action to improve the implementation of the Directive, including making Integrated Pest Management mandatory, there are no clear criteria or specific requirements to ensure its application and to assess the conformity of national legislation with the EU text, auditors point out.
As for the available low-risk pesticides, they represent only a small portion: only 16 substances out of 487 (3%).
While sales of active substances used in pesticides exceed 350,000 tonnes per year, Eurostat statistics on active substances and their use are not sufficiently detailed to be useful. The data provided by the Member States is also not sufficiently harmonised or updated.
The first two EU-wide risk indicators were only introduced in November 2019, ten years after the adoption of the Directive (see EUROPE 12370/4).
In a press release, the NGO PAN Europe (Pesticide Action Network) points out that since 2009, the use of pesticides has increased in almost all Member States; it is counting on the Green Deal to change the situation.
“The future strategy for sustainable food from farm to fork is a golden opportunity to set ambitious goals to move our agriculture towards agro-ecological practices that are free from synthetic pesticides”, says Martin Dermine. It calls for targets to reduce the use of these pesticides by 50% by 2025 and 80% by 2030, with a view to their total elimination by 2035.
The Court of Auditors’ report supports the European Parliament, which has already denounced the wait-and-see attitude of the Member States (see EUROPE 12193/10).
Link to the Court of Auditors' report: https://bit.ly/399AWhX (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)