Farm ministers agree to restrict use of dangerous pesticides

European agriculture ministers agreed on Monday (23 June) to draft rules to restrict the use of pesticides.

The new rules, which represent a compromise reached after two years of negotiations, would totally prohibit the marketing and use of substances proven to cause cancer, gene mutation or harm reproduction.

Pesticides that mimic or disrupt hormones – so-called endocrine disrupters – will also be banned.

Farmers and chemical producers must now replace pesticide products that are hazardous with safer alternatives.

In exceptional cases, when alternatives do not offer sufficiently effective plant protection, hazardous substances may still be used, but only under strictly regulated conditions, with a transitional period that cannot last longer than five years.

The rules replace the EU's 1991 pesticides legislation, and "enforces the high standards needed to prevent harmful effects of plant protection products on human and animal health or the environment," said Iztok Jarc, the Slovenian agriculture minister, whose country currently holds the six-month rotating EU presidency.

Regional approval

Pesticides will now be approved on a regional, rather than a national basis, with the EU divided into three zones: north, south and centre. The idea is that countries with similar geography should be able to decide whether a product may be used.

Furthermore, provisional licences, permitting the use of products while they are still in the process of being registered, are to be done away with, except where the registration process lasts longer than 18 months.

The rules also ban the use of pesticides near nature reserves and parks, and aims to reduce the use of animal testing involved in their production.

The use of crop-dusters will also be limited and farmers and pesticide manufacturers must now keep a record of their use.

The agreement, approved with abstentions from agriculture ministers from Romania, Hungary, Britain and Ireland, now moves to the European Parliament for discussion. The debate is expected to take place in the autumn, when MEPs are set to attempt to tighten the legislation still further.

Food crises

The four member states abstaining feel the bill is already too restrictive, arguing that when the world is undergoing its most acute food crisis in years, now is not the time to be introducing restrictions that they argue will reduce crop yields.

Environmentalists, for their part, counter that better organic farming can increase yields.

The deal comes just days after environmentalists published the first ever global ranking of pesticide producers listing those manufacturers that pose the severest threat to human health and the environment.

Two European firms, Germany's Bayer and BASF, as well as Syngenta of Switzerland, which is not in the European Union, found themselves in the top five, with Bayer ranked worst of all, in a Greenpeace report published last Monday (16 June).