A battle over pesticides in the EU. Timmermans in the EPP’s sights

The regulation sets EU-level targets to reduce the use and risk of chemical pesticides by 50% by 2030, in line with the EU’s ‘Farm to Fork’ and biodiversity strategies. New measures must ensure that all farmers and other professional users of pesticides practise integrated pest management (IPM): that is, an ecological system that focuses on pest prevention and gives priority to alternative methods of pest control, with chemical pesticides used only as a last resort.

However, the plan has come to a substantial halt on the part of member states, which on 27 December officially asked the European Commission for a further impact assessment.

In this complex and somewhat stalled situation, the proposal made by Frans Timmermans to the European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety on 22 May landed like a (big) stone in a pond. Timmermans described a whole series of more incisive environmental measures that the EU should adopt in the coming months and years, given a situation in which all or nearly all of its parameters, instead of improving, are getting worse.

Among these is raising the pesticide reduction target from 50% to 80% by 2030.
All hell broke loose. Herbert Dorfmann, the South Tyrolean MEP who coordinates agriculture for the EPP, responded immediately. ‘The European Parliament will not bow to Timmermans’s blackmail,’ he said, once again casting the Dutch Vice-President of the European Commission as the bogeyman.

‘The Commission has blackmail in store for the European Parliament,’ concluded the South Tyrolean MEP, thus setting fire to the powder keg of a debate that has by now become a clash.

Who is right? Who is spreading post-truths and ideologically driven scenarios, and who is actually defending that balance of public and private interests that underpins any coexistence based on justice and fairness?

Meanwhile, just in recent days, a study published in the journal Environmental Health has been made public, according to which several pesticide manufacturers allegedly concealed from the European authorities the ‘unfavourable’ results of pesticide tests, which clearly showed some harmful effects on laboratory animals of the substances they themselves market.

The news was picked up in particular by the French daily Le Monde. The pesticide study was carried out by the chemist Axel Mie (Stockholm University, Karolinska Institute) and the toxicologist Christina Rudén (Stockholm University). The ‘harmful effects’ of pesticide use, even under current restrictions, would concern ‘neurodevelopmental disorders’ in people, with consequences for the brain such as ‘autism, attention deficit and hyperactivity and other intellectual disabilities’. All conditions that are reported to be on the rise in many countries.

The research, based on a comparative study of the regulatory dossiers submitted by manufacturers to the American authorities on the one hand and the European ones on the other, identified ‘nine pesticides for which several manufacturers (including Bayer and Syngenta) conducted and submitted DNT studies to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but not to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)’.

These nine substances (abamectin, ethoprophos, buprofezin, fenamidone, fenamiphos, fluazinam, glyphosate-trimesium, pymetrozine, pyridaben) were therefore not taken into consideration when the European Authority issued the authorisations for their use, ‘mostly granted in the late 2000s’.

The impacts of pesticides on neurodevelopmental disorders ‘have been unequivocally demonstrated, not only in laboratory animals but also in humans’, reiterated the neurobiologist Yehezkel Ben-Ari, Emeritus Research Fellow director at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), a scientific authority independent of the Swedes. ‘On autism in particular, but also on IQ, we know that maternal exposure has an effect on the unborn child,’ he added.