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Reduction in chemical plant production substances not being filled by biocontrol

The number of chemical plant production substances available in Europe is dropping, reducing farmer options. This is exacerbated by the low number of products in the pipeline, which is six times less in Europe than in the rest of the world.  Biocontrol products are not filling the gap because the return on investment in Europe is 30% below the global average.  In Europe, the time to market for a biocontrol product is 7 – 9 years, compared with 2 – 3 years in other key global markets. This is stifling innovation in the biocontrol market.

Sources: Marchand, P.A. EU Chemical Plant Protection Products in 2023: Current State and Perspectives. Agrochemicals 2023, 2, 106-117. https://doi.org/10.3390/agrochemicals2010008  and EY Switzerland, What levers should be used for a better EU agriculture system? www.ey.com/en_ch/innovation/what-levers-should-be-used-for-a-better-eu-agriculture-system 



Short time to influence Commission work programme

The next Commission work programme will be announced in October 2024. This gives us a limited time to influence the direction of travel. The Biocontrol Coalition is already undertaking foundational advocacy work with high level messaging on the importance of optimising regulations. In early 2024 this will step up a notch, with the addition of more specific regulatory focus, shifting from policy to regulation. We will also engage with other European biocontrol trade associations.

To find out about membership of the Biocontrol Coalition and to register your interest in joining us, click here.

The rejection of the SUR underscores why the next Commission work programme needs an action point on fostering biocontrol innovation

Many hopes were riding on the future EU Sustainable Use of Pesticides Regulation (SUR) to create pressure for the Commission to unblock the regulatory pathway for biocontrol products. The rejection of the draft regulation by the European Parliament on 22 November 2023 put an end to those hopes. Although the Commission has not yet withdrawn its proposal and the Council discussed it at the December meeting of Agrifish ministers, the SUR is unlikely to be adopted, at least not in its current form nor before European elections in June 2024. In any case, while the draft SUR called for targets for the adoption of biocontrol products and made some minor suggestions to accelerate the process for bringing biocontrol products to market, it did not address the greatest obstacles to fostering biocontrol innovation: extremely slow time-to-market compared to other key markets (like Brazil and the USA), the lack of a dedicated channel and experts with specialized knowledge, the cumbersome two-stage registration and approval process. Days before the EP vote on the SUR, farmer organisation COPA-COGECA released its “SUR Gap” publication, which outlined many of the concrete difficulties that would make it hard to achieve overly ambitious targets for biocontrol adoption under current circumstances. That is why – whether the SUR rises from the ashes like a phoenix or not – our Coalition calls for a radical rethink for the process of approving biocontrol products for the EU market.



Stakeholder interested will be better served by an improved regulatory process for biocontrol products

On 5 December 2023, the Biocontrol Coalition held our first meeting with agrifood stakeholders to discuss how facilitating biocontrol innovation would help farmers, consumers, and environmentalists meet their objectives. Farmer interests were well represented with COPA-COGECA, the European Landowners Organisation (ELO) and IFOAM-Organics Europe all attending. A consumer perspective was added by the Consumer Choice Centre (CCC). We outlined the difficulties the industry faces in bringing innovative biocontrol products to market and why it is vital for stakeholders to add their voices to our call for rethinking the regulatory framework to be more innovation-friendly while ensuring high levels of safety, health, and environmental protection. The stakeholders were extremely engaged and asked lots of great questions. All parties agreed to continue the conversation in the new year.

How the EU Strategic Dialogue on Agriculture
can boost innovation

We offer the following suggestions for enhancing the EU’s Strategic Dialogue and look forward to participating in future sessions:

  • Unleashing innovation needs to be at the heart of the dialogue. Europe’s farmers work under constantly changing conditions, whether from climate volatility or evolving consumer preferences. They need to be agile, which they can only be if they have the right enabling framework. That framework needs to be flexible enough to make new tools available in a timely manner.
  • Farmers across the EU need equal access to an ever-expanding toolbox of technologies and management innovations. Farming successfully requires adapting to local conditions, customer and consumer preferences, and many other factors. Farmers need the freedom to choose the options that are best suited to their situation. The current constraints on biocontrol products in the EU market restricts farmers’ capacity to increase productivity and adopt different production systems. Farmers compete with one another as well as with growers from other regions. Therefore, they need equal access to all available technologies to make the best choices. Today, there is no Single Market for biocontrol products, and this needs to change.
  • Europe’s Strategic Dialogue on Agriculture needs to connect the dots between grand visions and practical details. Biocontrol is a useful example of how concrete details can derail lofty visions. During the recent debates on the Sustainable Use Regulation, ambitious targets were set for more biocontrol solutions to be used by 2030. Unfortunately, as COPA-COGECA pointed out in “The SUR gap” brochure[1], the current regulatory framework for biocontrol makes it impossible to meet such targets because the time-to-market for new products is too long (7-9 years in the EU compared to 2-3 in other key markets) and too few biocontrol products make it through the bottle-necked regulatory process each year. As a consequence, many companies prefer to invest elsewhere, hurting the competitiveness of EU farmers. The slow approval of biocontrol products and the loss of chemical pesticides combine to result in a shrinking toolbox for plant protection, which increases losses and pest resistance. To improve the situation, we urgently need a single authority and timely one-step authorisation process for biocontrol products to reach the EU Single Market.

 

Download our statement in PDF:

[1] https://copa-cogeca.eu/Flexpage/DownloadFile/?id=13470017