Wageningen: A simpler way to clear Europe’s pesticide reassessment queue is now sitting on the desks of two influential members of Parliament, and it carries the unmistakable signature of the European Food Safety Authority. In written replies dated 8 May to French member Benoît Biteau and the Croatian member Biljana Borzan, EFSA set out a step-by-step counter to the Commission’s Omnibus simplification package, which had floated the idea of extending pesticide authorisations indefinitely whenever scientific review slips behind schedule. The agency’s response is brief but pointed. Hiring a small cohort of specialists and refusing badly drafted dossiers at the gate would clear the backlog in around three years, against an estimated eight under the Commission’s preferred route.
The technical argument turns on what causes the queue in the first place. EFSA officials describe a workflow where the gating step is not regulatory complexity but staffing thinness and the time wasted on industry files that arrive incomplete. The authority’s letter quantifies the gap with unusual frankness, listing the recruitment of roughly fifty additional experts as the single most important lever and noting that admissibility checks could be tightened to send back filings that are missing data on residue behaviour, environmental fate or operator exposure. That sequencing, EFSA argues, would do more to restore predictability than any blanket extension of approvals.
The political audience for this exchange is wider than the two members named on the cover sheet. Biteau, who has been arguing that automatic renewals would breach the precautionary spirit of Regulation 1107/2009, used the exchange to seed his own report on the Omnibus track. Borzan has used her seat on the environment committee to keep the proposal under scrutiny from the consumer-protection side. By writing to both, EFSA effectively places its preference on the public record before the Council’s working party on plant protection products convenes its next round of edits.
For national competent authorities the proposal has practical resonance. Many member states have warned that their rapporteur teams are already stretched thin by the pace of new active substance reviews, and that an extension regime would leave them administering products whose data packages have not been refreshed in more than a decade. Wageningen’s regulatory science cluster, which feeds expertise into the EU peer-review pool, has flagged the same risk. A modest expansion of Parma’s expert bench, in this reading, would relieve pressure on the rapporteur countries rather than create a parallel bureaucracy.
The Commission has so far defended the Omnibus track as a pragmatic response to litigation risk, particularly for substances whose paperwork timelines depend on cascading committee votes. Officials in the health and food safety directorate point out that any failure to issue a renewal decision before the legal expiry triggers automatic withdrawal, which can disrupt markets and create uneven access across the single market. EFSA’s letter acknowledges that pressure but argues that procedural fixes, staggered review windows, tighter admissibility and a published forward plan, would address the same problem without removing science from the decision loop.
Parliament’s plant protection rapporteur is expected to weigh the authority’s intervention in the next interinstitutional shadow meeting, with a first text revision potentially landing before the summer recess. Whether the Council’s preparatory bodies are ready to follow a science-led counterproposal remains the political question of the file.
