Revision of MRLs for banned pesticides: non-paper from 10 Member States
Written by Mathilde Dupré on .
At the Agriculture Council, around ten Member States called on the European Commission to swiftly revise EU legislation on maximum residue limits (MRLs) for pesticides, in order to put an end to the presence of residues from banned substances in imported products.
"Pesticides banned in the EU [...] continue to be subject to maximum residue limits [MRLs] when imported. This regulatory tolerance allows products treated with these pesticides to enter the internal market” states the document submitted to the European Commission by France, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Romania, and Spain, with the support of Austria.
The Member States in question deplore a “lack of coherence” between the regulation on the placing on the market of plant protection products and that on maximum residue limits. The former is based on a hazard-based approach, which prohibits the renewal of certain substances as soon as they meet specific “cut-off” criteria, classifying them as probably or surely carcinogenic or endocrine disrupting. The latter relies on a “less restrictive” risk-based approach, which also takes into account the level of exposure to the active substance.
The ten Member States therefore call on the Commission to publish, “by the end of 2025 at the latest,” its study on the import of pesticides banned in the EU, and to accompany it with a proposal to “systematically lower MRLs to the limit of detection, within a maximum of six months, for active substances no longer approved in the EU.”
