The French Presidency of the EU Council and the European Parliament reached a provisional political agreement, on Thursday 2 June, on a new regulation on statistics on agricultural input and output (SAIO).
For plant protection products (PPPs), a transitional period of 3 years from 2025 has been agreed, with an interim data collection for the reference year 2026 (see EUROPE 12964/6).
From the reference year 2028 onwards, data collection will be annual, with annual publication from 2030 onwards. However, these annual data collections are conditional on the existence of electronic registers for professional users of plant protection products, as requested by the EU Council. The collection of data on PPPs will be based on a common list of representative crops, which will evolve during the transition period.
The SAIO Regulation provides for European funding during this transitional period to help national statistical authorities prepare for the annual collection of PPP data.
The co-legislators agreed that the revised regulation should contain appropriate safeguard clause in order to avoid an increased administrative burden for farmers and national administrations.
The NGO PAN Europe deplored, on Friday 3 June, that Member States have managed to “postpone the publication of quality data on pesticide use to 2028, preventing the EU Commission from properly monitoring the 2030 pesticide reduction objectives from the European Green Deal”. The Commission had proposed that Member States should start reporting data on pesticide use in 2023. PAN Europe denounces the “unwillingness of some EU countries to be more transparent about the use of pesticides”.
As regards organic farming, the European Parliament and EU Council decided to ensure that the available statistics are consistent with other agricultural production statistics by integrating them into the datasets.
The revision of the regulation concerns data on agricultural production, crop products, inputs and agricultural prices. It aims to provide more accurate statistics on agricultural input (prices of seeds, pesticides, feed) and output (crop and animal production and prices) based on data collected from farms, administrative sources, intermediaries (dairies, etc.), wholesale entities and market organisations.
The text will be submitted to the Special Committee on Agriculture (SCA) before its formal adoption by the EU Council and the European Parliament. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)