Meeting the media, authorities and NGO’s
Many of the topics that we deal with in AGRO are of political interest so we risk getting involved in a public debate.
”If you live quietly, you live well,” so the saying goes and some of us who are involved in policy support regarding pesticides have felt that in the past year, while our colleagues who have provided advice about nitrogen norms and leaching to the Ministry of Environment and Food have been under fire. However, another saying goes that “nothing lasts forever”, so we should probably prepare ourselves for the eventuality that we can also come under fire.
In the autumn of 2017, AGRO negotiated a new contract with the Environmental Protection Agency regarding advice and support in connection with plant protection measures and biocides that covers a four-year period up to the end of 2021.
What will we give advice about? Part of the contract is concerned with the efficiency evaluation that is requisite in connection with approval of pesticides. This task is funded via the fee that the companies pay when they apply for approval and this task seldom attracts headlines.
The other part of the contract concerns the so-called ”non-surcharge tasks”, where politics become more visible. And it is in this connection that the adage about living quietly is perhaps no longer possible.
Pesticides can be politically sensitive issues
Examples of politically sensitive questions to which we have been asked to deliver input are re-registration of glyphosate, which unleashed a lengthy and very polarised debate, re-evaluation of the group of insecticides called neonicotinoids, where the jury is still out, and, most lately, the discussion about the correlation between the use of azole fungicides in agriculture and resistance in the fungus Aspergillus, which can cause disease in humans.
In addition, we are presently involved in evaluating the effect of the pesticide levy, and have also been requested to provide input to future scenarios to help give politicians a basis on which to evaluate if the pesticide levy should continue and, if so, how it should be constructed.
With regard to the pesticide levy, the agricultural organisations have a clear desire to get rid of it and there is no doubt that they will work hard to achieve that goal. With our contribution to policy support, we risk putting ourselves at odds to the agricultural sector and therefore “living life quietly” can quickly become a thing of the past.
There is no reason to be overly pessimistic but it is important to consider how to manage massive pressure and be ready to take on such a situation. It would be a novel situation for us ”pesticide people”, where we might need to draw on the experience from those of our colleagues who have been through similar episodes.