After the political gridlock of the Nature Restoration Directive in the EU Parliament, the pesticide directive, Sustainable Pesticide Use Directive (SUD), seems likely to face a similar fate of being too mutilated with amendments to come out of committee recognisable. The EU’s “legislative train schedule” summarised the directive’s current state of play in Parliament—“Almost 300 amendments were tabled. Technical discussions are ongoing”—as a situation similar to what led to the stalemate over the Nature Restoration Law, which ended July 12th by a thin margin of 12 votes.
Also part of the Green Deal, the Commission wants to update the directive, by mandating a 50% reduction in the use of synthetic pesticides and herbicides in farming by 2030.
For the farming sector, the goal is terrifyingly out-of-touch, top-down, and ideological, but not so for the local population. A citizen’s initiative calls for EU legislation to go even further than the Commission is already pushing.
Only the seventh successful citizens’ initiative in the history of the EU, Save the Bees and Farmers wants an enforced 80% reduction in the use of synthetic pesticides in EU agriculture by 2030, surpassing the EU Commission’s target by 30%; they also want a complete phasing out of synthetic pesticides by 2035; they are calling for agriculture to “become a vector of biodiversity recovery.”
Formally accepted earlier this year, it has garnered 1.4 million signatories, each one representing a citizen of an EU member state.
A European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) is provided for in the Treaty of the European Union as a means of direct citizen participation in the EU lawmaking process. An initiative is essentially a request for EU legislative action on a particular issue, and the Commission is obliged to reply, treating it similarly to requests from the EU Parliament and Council.
Achieving a successful ECI is no small undertaking. Besides articulating a request in line with EU treaties, it requires setting up a multinational organisation and then getting at least one million signatories for the petition within 12 months. The standards are set up to prove that a sufficient breadth and depth of Europeans support the proposal to warrant action by Brussels (like the pro-life ECI One of Us, which calls for the protection of human embryos and was one of the first successful ECIs). The successful initiative unites an already existing movement into a single platform with recognized leaders and thinkers at the helm.
The Save the Bees and Farmers initiative is no different. The seven citizen representatives who officially submitted the initiative include heads of national beekeeper associations and large, well-known, and funded environmental groups.
The drive of ordinary citizens to steer European environmentalist policy is also demonstrable beyond the signatures.
In an article about the initiative, Investigate Europe told the story of the small town of Mals in South Tyrol. It sits in the heart of the region’s apple groves. About 14% of the apples there are grown organically, a high percentage for Europe but one that means the general population are regularly caught in the middle of fumigation with pesticides and herbicides. In 2014, the town held a referendum on the question of pesticide use, and three-fourths of the population voted to require apple growers to drastically reduce the amount of pesticides they spray. Farmers took the town to court and an ongoing legal battle has ensued.
There are also some farmers who have implemented organic, pesticide-free farming simply because it works.
The vineyard and winery Casar de Burbia in northwest Spain offers a small selection of Mencias and Godellos. It’s a small, family operation, the passion project of the father-founder now run by the second generation. All their grapes are grown organically and naturally, a choice that has proven to be a good business decision.
“Look at me. I’m no hippie, I don’t have earrings,” Isidro Fernández joked at a recent wine tasting, explaining his vineyards’ operations.
Over time, he simply found that using old-fashioned pesticide recipes—essentially infusions of native herbs—as well as organic fertilisers worked better than their synthetic counterparts, while costing less. Plant treatment products—the range of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilisers available to farmers—“inputs” in agro-speak—are some of the highest expenses farmers face. He estimated that while other vineyards had seen their costs increase dramatically following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he had not. Having the organic and natural label on his wine also gave it added value in the market. Besides, he had become distrustful of synthetic products.
“They say they’re safe, but then they wear suits when they’re spraying,” he said.
Pablo Ovalle keeps beehives not far from where Fernández grows his grapes. Ovalle has them high enough up in the mountains to keep them protected. He also works in vineyards—running a crew that prunes and picks according to the season.
He, too, is concerned about the toxicity of synthetic inputs, but he also knows that weed control is one of the most difficult and important elements of farming, consuming 70% of farmers’ efforts. Changes in demographics and farming itself almost necessitate the use of synthetic herbicides and heavy machinery (which he notes can problematically compact soil in vineyards).
“When there were more people to help in the family garden, it was easier to control weeds,” he muses, the labour shared among many hands. Now glysophate, a common herbicide increasingly linked to subtle but serious problems for both people and pollinators, does the work.
But most farmers need the herbicide, regardless of safety concerns. Jacobo Collantes, a commodities farmer near Palencia in Spain’s fertile northern plain, can’t imagine farming without it. He has looked into switching to organic farming but the numbers don’t convince him. The production tends to be lower.
However, he is most concerned about having to sell his crops at a loss, a situation he blames on allowing cheaper imports that outcompete European produce. This is the main concern of most opponents of pesticide-reduction mandates and a central question to the EU-Mercosur trade agreement currently in negotiations. Socialist, Romanian MEP Carmen Avram brought this up when the EU Parliament debated Save the Bees.
“I welcome this citizens’ initiative and the more than one million signatories alarmed by the disappearance of pollinators, and I think it is the perfect time to talk about the incoherence of the European executive,” she said. “For example, it is proposing nature restoration legislation to combat the decline of pollinators, even as it prepares to ratify, at any cost, the largest trade agreement in the Union’s history with South America.
She pointed out that farmers in the Mercosur block, which includes agro-giants Argentina and Brazil, use pesticides at levels already disallowed in the EU and seemingly without a thought for bees, butterflies, or forests, including in the Amazon.
At the very least, she cautioned the Commission, “a little consistency would go a long way to saving the bees and the agricultural sector as well.”
That would surely be a change both citizens and farmers would welcome.
As far as the citizen’s initiative is concerned, the Commission responded with encouragement, but stated that it thought the EU’s proposal for the pesticides directive was sufficient for the moment. Nevertheless, some in the EU Parliament are pushing to adopt the ECI’s 80% reduction by 2030 as EU law. The environment committee is scheduled to take a final vote on the directive in September and see if it can claw out a coherent consensus.
Whether from the bottom-up citizens’ initiative, or from incoherent EU trade policy imposed from above, European commercial farmers are going to get squeezed by regulations. Time will tell how hard.
Top-Down or Bottom-Up, Pesticides Are All the Buzz at the Commission
Save the Bees and Farmers campaign
After the political gridlock of the Nature Restoration Directive in the EU Parliament, the pesticide directive, Sustainable Pesticide Use Directive (SUD), seems likely to face a similar fate of being too mutilated with amendments to come out of committee recognisable. The EU’s “legislative train schedule” summarised the directive’s current state of play in Parliament—“Almost 300 amendments were tabled. Technical discussions are ongoing”—as a situation similar to what led to the stalemate over the Nature Restoration Law, which ended July 12th by a thin margin of 12 votes.
Also part of the Green Deal, the Commission wants to update the directive, by mandating a 50% reduction in the use of synthetic pesticides and herbicides in farming by 2030.
For the farming sector, the goal is terrifyingly out-of-touch, top-down, and ideological, but not so for the local population. A citizen’s initiative calls for EU legislation to go even further than the Commission is already pushing.
Only the seventh successful citizens’ initiative in the history of the EU, Save the Bees and Farmers wants an enforced 80% reduction in the use of synthetic pesticides in EU agriculture by 2030, surpassing the EU Commission’s target by 30%; they also want a complete phasing out of synthetic pesticides by 2035; they are calling for agriculture to “become a vector of biodiversity recovery.”
Formally accepted earlier this year, it has garnered 1.4 million signatories, each one representing a citizen of an EU member state.
A European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) is provided for in the Treaty of the European Union as a means of direct citizen participation in the EU lawmaking process. An initiative is essentially a request for EU legislative action on a particular issue, and the Commission is obliged to reply, treating it similarly to requests from the EU Parliament and Council.
Achieving a successful ECI is no small undertaking. Besides articulating a request in line with EU treaties, it requires setting up a multinational organisation and then getting at least one million signatories for the petition within 12 months. The standards are set up to prove that a sufficient breadth and depth of Europeans support the proposal to warrant action by Brussels (like the pro-life ECI One of Us, which calls for the protection of human embryos and was one of the first successful ECIs). The successful initiative unites an already existing movement into a single platform with recognized leaders and thinkers at the helm.
The Save the Bees and Farmers initiative is no different. The seven citizen representatives who officially submitted the initiative include heads of national beekeeper associations and large, well-known, and funded environmental groups.
The drive of ordinary citizens to steer European environmentalist policy is also demonstrable beyond the signatures.
In an article about the initiative, Investigate Europe told the story of the small town of Mals in South Tyrol. It sits in the heart of the region’s apple groves. About 14% of the apples there are grown organically, a high percentage for Europe but one that means the general population are regularly caught in the middle of fumigation with pesticides and herbicides. In 2014, the town held a referendum on the question of pesticide use, and three-fourths of the population voted to require apple growers to drastically reduce the amount of pesticides they spray. Farmers took the town to court and an ongoing legal battle has ensued.
There are also some farmers who have implemented organic, pesticide-free farming simply because it works.
The vineyard and winery Casar de Burbia in northwest Spain offers a small selection of Mencias and Godellos. It’s a small, family operation, the passion project of the father-founder now run by the second generation. All their grapes are grown organically and naturally, a choice that has proven to be a good business decision.
“Look at me. I’m no hippie, I don’t have earrings,” Isidro Fernández joked at a recent wine tasting, explaining his vineyards’ operations.
Over time, he simply found that using old-fashioned pesticide recipes—essentially infusions of native herbs—as well as organic fertilisers worked better than their synthetic counterparts, while costing less. Plant treatment products—the range of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilisers available to farmers—“inputs” in agro-speak—are some of the highest expenses farmers face. He estimated that while other vineyards had seen their costs increase dramatically following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he had not. Having the organic and natural label on his wine also gave it added value in the market. Besides, he had become distrustful of synthetic products.
“They say they’re safe, but then they wear suits when they’re spraying,” he said.
Pablo Ovalle keeps beehives not far from where Fernández grows his grapes. Ovalle has them high enough up in the mountains to keep them protected. He also works in vineyards—running a crew that prunes and picks according to the season.
He, too, is concerned about the toxicity of synthetic inputs, but he also knows that weed control is one of the most difficult and important elements of farming, consuming 70% of farmers’ efforts. Changes in demographics and farming itself almost necessitate the use of synthetic herbicides and heavy machinery (which he notes can problematically compact soil in vineyards).
“When there were more people to help in the family garden, it was easier to control weeds,” he muses, the labour shared among many hands. Now glysophate, a common herbicide increasingly linked to subtle but serious problems for both people and pollinators, does the work.
But most farmers need the herbicide, regardless of safety concerns. Jacobo Collantes, a commodities farmer near Palencia in Spain’s fertile northern plain, can’t imagine farming without it. He has looked into switching to organic farming but the numbers don’t convince him. The production tends to be lower.
However, he is most concerned about having to sell his crops at a loss, a situation he blames on allowing cheaper imports that outcompete European produce. This is the main concern of most opponents of pesticide-reduction mandates and a central question to the EU-Mercosur trade agreement currently in negotiations. Socialist, Romanian MEP Carmen Avram brought this up when the EU Parliament debated Save the Bees.
“I welcome this citizens’ initiative and the more than one million signatories alarmed by the disappearance of pollinators, and I think it is the perfect time to talk about the incoherence of the European executive,” she said. “For example, it is proposing nature restoration legislation to combat the decline of pollinators, even as it prepares to ratify, at any cost, the largest trade agreement in the Union’s history with South America.
She pointed out that farmers in the Mercosur block, which includes agro-giants Argentina and Brazil, use pesticides at levels already disallowed in the EU and seemingly without a thought for bees, butterflies, or forests, including in the Amazon.
At the very least, she cautioned the Commission, “a little consistency would go a long way to saving the bees and the agricultural sector as well.”
That would surely be a change both citizens and farmers would welcome.
As far as the citizen’s initiative is concerned, the Commission responded with encouragement, but stated that it thought the EU’s proposal for the pesticides directive was sufficient for the moment. Nevertheless, some in the EU Parliament are pushing to adopt the ECI’s 80% reduction by 2030 as EU law. The environment committee is scheduled to take a final vote on the directive in September and see if it can claw out a coherent consensus.
Whether from the bottom-up citizens’ initiative, or from incoherent EU trade policy imposed from above, European commercial farmers are going to get squeezed by regulations. Time will tell how hard.
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