The reform of agricultural statistical data on pesticide use, proposed by the European Commission last year and supported by the European Parliament, risks being torpedoed by the Council of the EU, warned the NGOs PAN Europe (Pesticide Action Network Europe), GLOBAL 2000 and ClientEarth, on Wednesday 2 February, on the eve of the opening of inter-institutional negotiations on this dossier.
The NGOs base this on their analysis of the documents from the in camera negotiations in the EU Council, to which they had access - an analysis they published the same day.
“If the EU Council in the trilogue pushes through its position, the data needed to scientifically assess the risks of pesticides and reduce them in the Green Deal will still be lacking in 2030”, Helmut Burtscher-Schaden, a biochemist at GLOBAL 2000 and co-author of the report, said in a video conference.
He recalled that the EU’s Farm to Fork (F2F) and biodiversity strategies for 2030 call for a reduction in the use and risks of chemical pesticides by half.
In February 2021, the Commission proposed to update the relevant agricultural Regulation on agricultural inputs and outputs to address the lack of accurate data on which pesticides are used for food production in the Member States and where and when they are used.
According to the NGOs, 10 Member States - Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Ireland - worked to water down the proposed Regulation.
They rejected: - that these statistics should be provided to Eurostat annually, preferring that they be provided every 5 years; - that data be collected from existing farm registers on pesticide use, instead of voluntary surveys on a more or less representative sample of farms; - that the data be provided in electronic format; - that the public be given full access to the positions of the Member States in the EU Council.
“Any suggestion by a Member State to water down the Commission’s proposal was systematically accepted by the rest of the EU Council”, lamented Natalija Svrtan, researcher at PAN Europe.
“Germany may have taken the lead in watering down the text, but it is remarkable that in the end, Germany and Austria voted against the EU Council’s position - Germany because of a change of government, with a Green Minister for Agriculture. For Austria, it is less clear”, Mr Burtscher-Schaden said.
The Court of Auditors itself, last February, found that Member States were not doing enough to reduce pesticide use (see EUROPE 12419/12).
See the report: https://aeur.eu/f/4y (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)