10/09/2026
On 2 September, the European Parliament’s ENVI and AGRI committees held a joint public hearing on the Food and Feed Safety Omnibus – the Commission’s package that would rewrite around ten EU food and feed safety laws, including the rules that govern how pesticides are approved and reassessed. It was meant to give MEPs the evidence they need before they work through the nearly 1,500 amendments now tabled on the file. Instead, it became a case study in exactly the kind of imbalance our Deregulation Monitor was built to track.
Who gets a seat at the table
Ahead of the hearing, Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Europe wrote an open letter to the committee chairs, warning that the speaker panel lacked independent expertise in human toxicology, environmental health and pesticide risk assessment, and raising questions about the affiliations of several invited speakers. Greens/EFA MEP Tilly Metz says the imbalance played out much as feared: most speakers represented chemical-intensive agriculture and industry interests, while only one independent scientist actively publishing on pesticide ecotoxicology – Professor Martina Vijver of Leiden University – took the floor, and no expert on human health spoke at all. For legislation this consequential, who gets invited to brief lawmakers isn’t a technicality. It shapes what MEPs hear, and just as importantly, what they don’t.
The substance: three warnings, three fixes
Speaking as that lone independent scientist, Vijver laid out three concerns about the current text: it would allow indefinite approval of pesticide active substances, would only trigger reassessment once a risk has already been flagged rather than on a regular schedule, and offers no clear exit route for substances that later turn out to be harmful. Her underlying argument was simple – scientific understanding of pesticide risk keeps evolving, so a regulatory system needs to be able to act on new evidence, not lock in yesterday’s judgement calls. She also put forward alternatives: a faster track for lower-risk biocontrol products, better staffing, digitalisation and dossier-quality screening at approval authorities, and a signalling system built on post-market monitoring, paired with a legal obligation to act on what it finds. Framed this way, the choice isn’t “innovation versus safety” – it’s whether the EU is willing to invest in making both work at once.
Why this moment still matters
Member States have already agreed a Council position on the file. That leaves the European Parliament as the arena where the balance between “simplification” and protection will actually be fought out over the coming weeks – and where MEPs who haven’t yet settled their position can still be reached.