Europe's Green Deal should get orange caution flag

In principle, Europe’s Green Deal and its subsequent Farm to Fork Strategy align with what the global agriculture industry is already widely doing. The Farm to Fork Strategy outlines the need to make food systems fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly. This is a vision I think we can all get behind.

Going one step further, the strategy outlines the importance of reducing the environmental impact of agriculture, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change, reversing biodiversity loss, ensuring food security, and keeping food affordable and promoting fair trade. These are all areas where the plant science industry is actively engaged.

Sustainability is one of the most important driving forces for CropLife Canada’s member companies. In fact, many of our members who have a presence around the world, have made clear and measurable commitments to significantly improve environmental, social, and economic sustainability as it relates to agricultural production.

These include targets like increasing crop yields while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions, enhancing biodiversity, improving soil health, conserving water, investments in helping farmers mitigate the impacts of climate change and committing to carbon neutrality within corporate operations to name just a few. And these all build on our industry’s long history of continuous improvement that have made Canadian agriculture more sustainable today than it has ever been before.

In addition, the plant science industry has been a long-time leader in developing stewardship programs to responsibly manage the full lifecyle of its products, such as the empty container recycling program. In Canada, over 65 per cent of empty pesticide containers are recovered for recycling through Cleanfarms, and its vision, which the industry is relentlessly pursuing, is a 100 per cent rate of recycling.

While I am hopeful the Green Deal drives positive movement towards a more sustainable food production system both in Europe and around the world, the European Union’s propensity to allow ideology to drive policy is worrisome.

We are seeing countries like France diverge from the science-based decisions of many respected regulatory bodies around the world when it comes to regulating innovative agricultural technologies. Their reliance on a misguided interpretation of the ‘precautionary principle’ and a hazard-based approach have been devastating for the domestic agriculture industry and has created enormous challenges for countries that export to Europe.

We’ve seen science-based risk assessments at the EU level on GMOs ignored in favour of local politics. And recently, we’ve seen Europe move to essentially categorize crops developed through gene editing as GMOs, which will stifle innovation and rob European farmers of a plant breeding tool that could lead to crops that more efficiently use resources, require less inputs like pesticides and fertilizers, and have improved nutritional qualities – all things that would contribute to greater sustainability in the region.

The Farm to Fork Strategy sets out arbitrary targets for reducing pesticide use that fail to take into account the critical role these tools play in helping farmers protect their crops and produce a safe and abundant food supply. They also fail to recognize the environmental benefits of using herbicides for weed control over mechanical tillage, which releases significant amounts of carbon and damages soil health.

These targets don’t consider the incredible advancements made in pesticides over the last half a century. Pesticides that hit the market today use 95 per cent less active ingredient per acre than they did 60 years ago. This ultimately means farmers can apply lower doses of pesticides while still protecting their crops against insects, weeds and diseases.

Globally, the plant science industry is also investing billions of dollars in research and development for biological pesticides. There’s great promise here for biopesticides to add choices for farmers in their battle against pests but they will not serve as a wholesale replacement for synthetic pesticides and that’s something we need to keep in mind.

The EU has enforced a temporary ban on neonics across a number of crops since 2013, something that no other major agricultural market in the world has done. The justification for the ban is the impact of neonics on honeybees – something the science just doesn’t support. It also fails to recognize the value neonics have delivered from a sustainability perspective. Neonic seed treatments have helped significantly reduce the amount of active ingredient required to control insects.

And now, about half of the countries across Europe have applied for emergency exemptions to allow farmers to use neonics because their crops were being devastated by insects for which there was no other way to control them.

And then there’s glyphosate, which perhaps best highlights Europe’s ideological conundrum. There isn’t a pesticide on the planet that has been studied more. Regulatory agencies and scientific bodies around the world, including those in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, have all confirmed its safety. But despite all this, the EU is under intense pressure from activist groups to ban glyphosate.

These same groups who pressure the EU to ban glyphosate advocate for the continued use of copper sulfate, a fungicide widely used in organic agriculture. The difference here is that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) declared copper compounds to be a public health and environmental safety concern and the European Chemicals Agency has declared it a carcinogen.

Watching Europe try to combine the precautionary principle, support of organic agriculture and a desire to be seen as science-based in an effort to support sustainability is like watching them trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It just isn’t possible.

Here in Canada we need to be cautious about looking to Europe as a model for agricultural sustainability. Their sustainability agenda is mired in hypocrisy. They cannot truly deliver on their commitments to sustainability in agriculture if they arbitrarily rule out the use of certain technologies like pesticides and gene editing based on ideology. These are the kinds of innovations that will drive sustainable agriculture.

I’d encourage our Canadian leaders to instead look at how Canadian agriculture can position itself as a true leader in sustainable food production, and demonstrate this to export markets like Europe, in order to support growth in the sector and across the economy.

CropLife Canada and others in the Canadian agriculture industry are actively advocating for risk-based decision making in Europe and trying to limit any spread of the precautionary principle and a hazard-based approach to regulation to the rest of the world. We must all remain vigilant in defending against non-tariff trade barriers and protectionist approaches from Europe because we’re already seeing a concerted effort by some EU countries to export their ideology to developing parts of the world that can ill-afford to reject agricultural innovations.

The challenge remains of trying to fight ideology with science.

Pierre Petelle,
President and CEO, CropLife Canada