The Real Chemical Brothers
European parliamentarians, with encouragement from Big Ag, gutted and then rejected the pesticides bill
No long-winded preamble this week. It’s been both a fascinating and a horrifying week so I’m just saying what needs to be said below.
If you are already lamenting the state of the world today, you might want to skip this edition of Thin Ink, because what happened this week in Europe will add to the feeling that we are really teetering on the edge of a precipice.
On Wednesday, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted down the pesticide legislation, a key bill to make food systems more sustainable in Europe, following pushback from rightwing politicians and farmers. On the same day, Geert Wilders, an anti-Islam far-right politician, won the Dutch general elections.
If these two are a harbinger of what 2024 is supposed to bring - we have elections for the U.S. and the EU parliament next year - well, we are in for a rough ride.
Paradoxically, there is some tempered hope among the Myanmar diaspora, including yours truly, that we might actually get our country back in the near future as the military regime struggles to contain well-timed attacks from an alliance of ethnic armed groups and pro-democracy fighters.
I’ve been in Asia for much of this month, working mostly and sleeping rarely, but managed to snatch a couple of hours this week to sit, with hope in my heart, at a beautiful spot where I could see the mountains that mark the border between my home country and a neighbouring one.
But let’s get back to the demise of the bill known in the Brussels bubble as the SUR, short for “Sustainable Use of Plant Protection Products Regulation” which aimed to reduce the use of chemical pesticides by 50% by 2030 and to ban all pesticide use in areas such as public parks, playgrounds and schools.
A Gutted Bill
It was a long and bitter fight, but in the end, there were 299 votes against the legislation, 207 in favour, and 121 abstentions.
“The outcome of the vote caused an uproar in the aftermath given that a rejection of a Commission proposal at the first reading without a referral back to the leading committee is exceedingly rare,” said ARC2020, a platform for organisations working on food, farming and rural policies in the EU.
The rejection of a call to send the text back to the Parliament’s environment committee for reshaping meant “it is effectively a dead end for the file,” it added.
According to the FT, “One reason for the result was that many Green and socialist MEPs ended up voting against a bill they had previously supported because of right-wing efforts to weaken its provisions.”
ARC2020 has more details, saying, “a concerted campaign from the right of the Parliament saw a flurry of amendments which ultimately gutted the draft text of its substance.”
The parliament's Greens/EFA group said in a statement that these changes include adopting meaningless reduction targets, removing the protection for kindergartens, schools, hospitals, and old people homes, and deleting binding rules for integrated pest management, which would have been an important tool to implement sustainable practices in agriculture.
This was done by right-wing MEPs together with the far-right, cheered on by the big agri industry lobbies, it said.
“In the end, the text was not good enough for anyone to support it. Members of the European Parliament failed to protect human health and the health of our planet,” the statement added.
Many green groups pushing for food systems to become more sustainable also decried the outcome.
“A majority in the Parliament has decided to side with the agroindustry and its allies, who have lobbied against this proposal over the last 2 years, ignoring the scientific consensus on the need to transform our current food system,” Madeleine Coste, Slow Food Advocacy Director, said in a statement.
“It is outrageous that scientists’ and citizens’ voices are ignored in this way, and a worrying prospect for the fate of the EU Farm to Fork Strategy, and the transition to sustainable food systems.”
She was referring to this open letter signed by 6,000 scientists and the “Save Bees and Farmers” campaign signed by 1.1 million European citizens which demanded an end to pesticides.
The vote came less than a week after the European Commission extended the use of the controversial chemical herbicide glyphosate for 10 more years.
Sending The Wrong Signal
A former senior official with the Commission I spoke to has this to say.
“The rejection of the pesticide law proposal is a very bad news both for farmers and for environment. The farming sector needs a direction and the Green Deal had the merit to point to sustainability by acting on soils, pesticide use, antibiotic use, animal welfare, food systems etc.”
“At a moment when farmers, especially young farmers, are willing to make a move and get more aligned with societal needs, it is a pity that the Parliament could not widen the discussion beyond the so-called food security. The EU is sending a series of wrong signals to the farming community!”
The Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) also called it “a shockingly short-sighted move” because after all, the harms of excessive use of chemical pesticides are well-known.
“Every year, pesticide concentrations exceed thresholds of concern in up to a quarter of monitoring sites in European rivers and lakes, and they contaminate over 80% of the EU’s agricultural soils,” the European Environment Agency (EEA) has said. Pesticides are a primary driver of declines in populations of insects, birds and many other groups of species.
“Human exposure to pesticide residues in Europe is also widespread, with 84% of the samples in a large study across five European countries found contaminated with mixtures of at least two different pesticides. These levels of exposure are clearly unsustainable.”
The situation has not changed much since 2009, when the EU Directive on the sustainable use of pesticides was adopted. In fact, overall pesticide sales have remained stable in Europe over the past decade, according to the EEA.
And yet, big farm lobbies like Copa-Cogeca and the conservative European People's Party (EPP), which have called the targets to reduce the use of chemical pesticides as “unrealistic” and “an extremist approach” have hailed the vote. I’m re-upping my issue on Copa-Cogeca below in case you want to know more about them.
Thin’s Pickings
EU Lawmakers ‘Do Not Speak For Us’ Say Farmers Ahead of Crunch Vote - DeSmog
Clare Carlile continues to expose the close links between big farm lobbies and influential politicians at the EPP. Worth reading this alongside our investigation into the EU’s most powerful farm lobby and Clare’s mapping of the ties between Big Ag and Europe’s right wing politicians.
Whose Food, What Crisis? - De Dépendance
If you’re going to be in Rotterdam on the evening of Dec 11 (Monday), come listen to Jennifer Clapp – one of the world’s leading authorities on food systems (yes I’m a fangirl) – followed by a conversation with yours truly and agroecological farmer Klarien Klingen.
Covering Food Systems — The Next Climate Action Battleground - Society of Environmental Journalists.
I wrote a piece for the SEJ urging more journalists to scrutinise the linkages between food, climate change, and fossil fuel addiction, and also to change how we frame the debates around food systems.
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