What is simplification?
Simplification is the process which aims to streamline legislation and reduce red tape. Over the past months, the European Commission has launched several simplification packages and proposals, including organics and environment.
With the simplification package on food and feed, the EU Commission aims to reduce unnecessary administrative burdens and costs for producers, companies, operators and authorities, whilst also maintaining high standards for food and feed safety.
By creating a legal framework that is more agile and allows operators to adapt, innovate, invest and grow, the Commission hopes simplification will improve the competitiveness and resilience of EU food and feed systems.
What areas are covered in the proposal?
The Food and Feed Simplification proposals covers topics across animal health and welfare, plant protection products and food hygiene. It proposes to amend several pieces of EU legislation, with significant changes proposed for plant protection products in particular.
Key changes include:
- Indefinite approval for most active substances, removing the time-based renewal requirements.
- Establishing a simpler procedure to identify low-risk active substances, to encourage uptake and development of more sustainable pesticides.
- Establishing simpler procedures for basic substances (e.g. vinegar, mustard seed powder, baking powder) for plant protection products
- Accelerating the authorisation of products containing substances targeting particularly damaging pests.
- Providing technical and scientific support from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to the Member State leading a risk assessment, to significantly reduce delays and provide clarity more quickly on necessary risk-management options.
- Facilitating the authorisation of low-risk pesticides in multiple Member States, to create more equal availability of such products for farmers.
- Introducing stronger import rules for pesticide residues to ensure a level playing field.
- Sets out how the Commission will identify certain types of drones for spraying pesticides, with potential to lower the exposure of humans and the environment to pesticides compared to land-based spraying.
In addition, the legislative proposals put forward several changes for other areas, including feed additives and BSE surveillance:
- Indefinite approval for feed additive authorisations (with limited exceptions), removing 10-year renewal requirements.
- Introduction of digital labelling for non-safety information for feed additives.
- Removal of annual reporting obligation on depopulation operations.
- Modernisation of BSE/TSE surveillance, specified risk material and products of animal origin mitigation requirements to enable swift updates to control measures.
What happens next?
The European parliament and the Council will now review the proposal for adoption.