Unsurprisingly, the European Commission is to renew the licence for the active substance glyphosate, which expires in the European Union on 15 December, for a further 10 years, the Commission said on Thursday 16 November,
As the same causes produce the same effects, the EU Member States, meeting on Thursday in an appeal committee, once again failed to reach the qualified majority required to approve or reject the Commission’s proposal, presented in exactly the same form as the EU27 experts had failed to approve or reject in sufficient numbers on 13 October in the Standing Committee on Plants, Food and Feed (ScoPAFF) (see EUROPE 13271/5). It was taken for granted that, in such cases, the Commission was empowered to take the decision alone.
In support of its decision to go ahead despite the concerns (see EUROPE 13285/5, 13280/18), the Commission announced that it had no other choice under the comitology rules in force. “The Commission is now obliged to adopt a decision before 15 December 2023”, said the Commission. Qualified majority means at least 55% of the Member States (15 countries out of 27) representing at least 65% of the total population of the EU.
The active substance in the most widely used herbicide has been recognised as a probable human carcinogen by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer since 2015, but is still not recognised by the European agencies - the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). The Commission’s proposal is based on the results of the scientific assessment of the risks to health and the environment carried out by these two EU agencies.
In 2017, the renewal proposal, initially for 10 years, which had already caused a lot of ink to flow, was reduced to 5 years, as the Commission, anxious to achieve sufficient support from the Member States, agreed to amend its text twice (see EUROPE 11913/1, 11890/10) after a non-binding vote of objection by the Parliament.
Such a vote of objection, which the Greens/EFA and The Left parties would have liked to see at this year’s plenary session of the Parliament, was not supported by the other political groups (see EUROPE 13278/13, 13264/5).
Responding to questions from the press as to whether the Commission could still amend its proposal, for example by reducing the duration of the authorisation, Health and Food Safety spokesman Stefan de Keersmaecker acknowledged that an amendment was “legally possible, but we still need a qualified majority. There is no compromise proposal on this text”.
The institution’s chief spokesman, Eric Mamer, added: “It’s legally possible, but it’s no longer possible between now and 15 December”.
France, which was in favour of a 7-year period, abstained.
It will be up to the Member States to decide whether to authorise glyphosate as a finished product.
The Commission’s announcement has once again sparked outrage among opponents of the renewal who, like the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament and environmental NGOs, believe that there is sufficient evidence to ban glyphosate.
“Glyphosate must be taken off the market. The Commission has no clear support for authorisation”, emphasised Jutta Paulus.
For Natacha Cingotti, head of the ‘Health and Chemicals’ Programme at the NGO HEAL, “this new failure to garner a member states’ majority in favour of a 10-year renewal of glyphosate shows that it has become politically impossible to ignore the state of the science”.
Satisfaction was once again expressed by the herbicide’s supporters. The agricultural union Copa Cogeca reiterated that as “currently there is not any equivalent alternative to this herbicide”, glyphosate should continue to be used in agriculture. ‘“We need glyphosate to ensure food safety, but it must be properly regulated”, said Anne Sander MEP (EPP, French). (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)