December 2023
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 Although the Commission has not yet withdrawn its proposal and the Council discussed it at the December meeting of Agrifish ministers, the SUR is unlikely to be adopted, at least not in its current form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.