News

Member States continue to negotiate within the EU Council on the Directive on the sustainable use of pesticides, and Spain, under its Presidency, would like to reach a general approach on this issue within the Council by the end of this year. Member States are currently negotiating the level of national reduction targets and the definition of sensitive areas, but after two meetings in the past week (07/11/2023 and 10/11/2023), representatives have so far been unable to reach a preliminary agreement. Member States are still confronted with diverging views on whether reduction targets should be set for the national level as envisaged by the European Commission or less binding national contributions. According to the European media, only Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands support the introduction of binding national targets for pesticide reduction, while the remaining Member States are more likely to support the path of non-binding national action plans, which could describe how individual Member States will contribute to the European reduction target. According to information from European agricultural organisations, RO, CZ, PL, HU, LV, IT, SK, BG, EL and LT expressed direct opposition to setting binding national reduction targets. The next technical meeting should take place between 22-24/11/2023 and 28/11/2023, with a meeting at the level of agricultural attachés on 29/11/2023. The last meeting under the Spanish Presidency is scheduled for 11-12/12/2023.

On 08/11/2023, the European Commission authorised the registration of a new European initiative entitled "Creation of a European Environmental Bureau". According to the coordinators of the initiative, the new office should act as a successor to the European Environment Agency, or it could operate independently of the Agency. The new body would have the power to issue binding administrative decisions, monitor activities with an impact on the environment and impose sanctions for pollution. The organisers will now have 12 months to collect at least 1 million signatures from citizens in at least 7 EU countries, after which the Commission would be obliged to take up the initiative.
More information is available here.

Agriculture and Rural Development Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski said last week that synthetic 'meat' cannot be considered meat, just as synthetic 'milk' cannot be considered milk. The Commissioner expressed his support for natural products and said that it was not the right way to use the name natural products even for synthetic food. In doing so, he supported an earlier statement by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development that the Commission was beginning to consider the protection of names of food of animal origin.
More information is available here.

Gert-Jan Oplaat, President of the Dutch Poultry Industry Association (NEPLUVI), calls for a halt to duty-free imports of poultry meat from Ukraine. Ukraine accounts for a quarter of Europe's chicken meat imports with an import volume of 220,000 tonnes. The high growth of cheap Ukrainian chicken meat, which does not meet European environmental and animal welfare standards, distorts the European market and also misses the original objective of helping the Ukrainian population due to the near monopoly of exports, according to Oplaat.
More information is available here.

The European elections will take place on 06-09/06/2024, new MEPs will be elected for the period 2024 - 2029, and changes will also take place within the European Commission. The European Parliament will increase the number of MEPs from the current 705 to 720. However, in addition to the changes in the number of seats, the European Parliament also plans to modernise its committee structure to keep pace with the legislation presented by the European Commission. The number of European Parliament committees could be reduced from 20 to 15, and new committees could be created to focus on EU enlargement, digital policy, health or defence. One of the options under consideration is also to merge the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (COMENVI), the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development (COMAGRI) and the Committee on Fisheries (COMPECH) into one, in order to ease tensions between committees on sensitive topics such as the sustainable use of pesticides or the Industrial Emissions Directive. However, these are still considerations, and the final changes are unlikely to be announced until the first half of next year.