There are very few occasions in which the political consensus in Brussels shifts significantly, especially not in a short period of time. In agricultural policy, a significant shift is happening in real time, as the Food and Feet Safety Simplification omnibus package is currently going through its regulatory stages. There is, for the first time, a broad consensus that approval processes for pesticides should not happen in an eternal multi-year loop, but that a re-authorisation process is only really necessary when important new evidence is discovered.
For many decades, the European Union has followed the precautionary principle when it comes to food regulation. What sounds like common sense but functions like a permission slip for bureaucrats to say no to anything they don’t understand, indefinitely, without ever having to justify the cost of saying no. It inverts the burden of proof: instead of demonstrating that a technology or product is dangerous, regulators simply demand that innovators prove a negative, an exercise that can never be fully satisfied and therefore never has to end. This has led to a situation in which pesticides that were previously approved are never replaced by more innovative new solutions, because the latter get stuck in an endless regulatory process that takes decades.
While this new simplification approach does not hollow out the precautionary principle, which for all intents and purposes is codified, it at least removes the burden on existing products being subjected to an unnecessary rotating political approval process. Take the example of glyphosate: the most commonly used herbicide in conventional European agriculture makes sure that farmers retain access to reliable yields by rooting out weeds that deprive crops of sunshine, water and nutrients. Its safety has been established by endless levels of independent scientific bodies. Under EU pesticide law (Regulation 1107/2009), active substance approvals generally get renewed for a maximum of 15 years, but glyphosate has never gotten that long in one go, it’s been renewed repeatedly on shorter cycles because of the controversy, if not to say “conspiracy” around it. The most recent renewal, adopted by the European Commission in November 2023, granted a 10-year approval, running through December 15, 2033. Before that, glyphosate had only had a five-year renewal (2017–2022, later extended by a year to cover the review period), and before that a series of short-term extensions while EFSA and ECHA finished their risk assessments.
Current amendments to the Food and Feet Safety Simplification omnibus package would make the approval of many chemicals permanent, instead of launching months-long political debate for each chemical product. The latter were antithetical to good policy-making: chemicals are to be handled by scientific authorities, not political decision-makers. In the same way that we asked scientific oversight bodies to review data on vaccines, instead of putting them in the hands of committees during COVID-19.
What this means for consumers is more than the complicated regulatory legalese would make it seem. Consumers need access to safe, affordable, and available food options. Through the use of crop protection, we have created an environment since the end of WW2 in which almost all consumers do, even in times in which we face cost of living challenges. Reducing access of farmers to the wide toolbox of protecting their crops means that we produce less on this continent, and bring in more from outside. While the latter does sometimes reduce costs, it also increases dependencies on other nations, despite the fact that many European countries are ideally situated to produce food. The conclusion that this European Commission has wanted to make is that the large farmer protests we have seen since 2021 had a point: food production in Europe is overregulated and too administratively burdensome to be financially sustainable. The Food and Feet Safety Simplification omnibus in its current negotiation stage doesn’t solve all of the points the farmers made nor all the changes consumers need, but it’s a step in the right direction.
