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This analysis relates to the ongoing reform of the EU regulations on the “Statistics on
Agricultural Input and Output” (SAIO).
This legislative reform is pivotal because it is meant to ensure the availability of the data needed to measure progress towards the reduction target at the core of the EU Farm to Fork Strategy: the 50% reduction in the use of pesticides.
Today, the legal framework is weak. As a result, Eurostat receives incomplete data from Member States on the use of pesticides and only publishes very vague aggregated datasets.
No precise data is available showing what pesticides were used in recent years to produce food in the EU, nor where, when and in which quantities.
The proposal of the European Commission (Eurostat) repealing Regulation (EC) No 1185/2009
concerning statistics on pesticides was published in February 2021.
Since then, the Agriculture Committee of the European Parliament has adopted its position supporting key aspects of the proposal. They support several amendments to ensure in law that the data obtained and published will be at a meaningful level of detail and quality.
The Council has now published its “Mandate for negotiations with the European Parliament”.
This note aims first to explain what the amendments put forward by the Council mean for the future collection and publication of data on pesticides use. Appendices expose in more details the weaknesses of the key arguments raised by Member States to support such position.