A piece of somewhat better news
European Parliament held a vote on pesticides in Ecological Focus
Areas (EFA) in the middle of June. According to the current
regulation Nitrogen fixing crops can be counted as EFAs, even without
any specific controls on pesticides, making them pointless from the
environmental point of view. The Commission thus decided to rectify
this situation with a delegated act banning use of pesticides in all
EFAs – something that should be seen as completely natural.
The Parliament’s COMAGRI decided however to block this move, as
also was written in the previous post on this blog. In order to veto
the Commission’s delegated act the Parliament would need an
absolute majority. All the major European environmental NGOs did
their best to avoid this nasty thing happening. People wrote, phoned,
tweeted and used all possible means to reach out to the MEPs. I did
my bit as well of course.
The vote was close. Actually there was a simple majority for
continued use of pesticides in EFAs but in order to repeal the
delegated act an absolute majority was required. It did not
materialise luckily even though the actual vote was only a bit more
that ten short of the absolute majority. The delegated act
prohibiting use of pesticides in EFAs can now take hold – a small
step in right direction.
The environmental NGOs can sigh a relief. The decision however is
only about a small proportion of all EU agricultural land, on most of
it the “poisoning as usual” can go on. In order to seriously deal
with risks to our health and environment caused by the pesticides we
need a radical reform of the CAP.
Author: Aleksei Lotman
Author: Aleksei Lotman
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