We offer the following suggestions for enhancing the EU 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.
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