The herbicide DCPA (also known as Dachtal) has so far mainly been used on vegetables such as broccoli and onions in the USA and elsewhere. It can cause damage even before birth, from which people suffer for the rest of their lives. There has been no such herbicide ban as an emergency procedure in the USA for 40 years. (EPA bans DCPA pesticide Dachtal weedkiller)

In the EU, the ban was 15 years faster in a regular process. The herbicide was no longer authorised here in 2009.

This means that pregnant agricultural workers in particular have not had to risk the lives of their children for 15 years.

It can therefore be said that even in a highly industrialised country with first-class science, the approval of a plant protection product is no guarantee that the plant protection products approved there are safe.

Those who take the precautionary principle seriously will recognise dangers earlier and ban many substances earlier for good rational and scientific reasons – and continue to use other substances responsibly.

The example also illustrates that importing food from other countries with lower standards is unfair and economically damaging for German/European farmers. Those who are allowed to use cheap and toxic herbicides do not have to price in more environmentally friendly and more expensive methods. This does not change the fact that this would make sense in many cases for environmental and health reasons and would save society as a whole a great deal of money. Citizens should actually be able to rely on the fact that the health risk of food for themselves, for the farmers and for the environment does not depend on the country of origin.

If other countries attach less importance to health, in some cases only import bans will help as a first step.

However, here in Germany and in the EU, we not only want to enjoy healthily grown food, but also affordable and readily available food from the EU and other countries.

That is why we in the EU and especially in Germany, and also with regard to the international export of technology, must constructively create new processes for better and more cost-effective crop protection. This is the only way that we can continue to provide safe crop protection in agriculture under increasingly uncertain weather conditions and work so economically that we can sell both the food and the crop protection technologies. If modern processes are used internationally, we can also import products that have been produced under good conditions at fair prices. At least then there will be no more dumping in terms of health and environmental standards.

We must actively utilise and expand this lead in responsible action in plant protection in order to generate benefits for everyone – not just for pregnant women who no longer have to put their children at risk. This means that the precautionary principle in the EU must be applied consistently and on a sound and comprehensive factual basis for all methods of plant protection. This has obviously worked with DCPA. It was not authorised as early as 2009. 

In the risk assessment of glyphosate, too, there are currently serious indications that the precautionary principle may not have played the role in the latest scientific and legal assessments that the EU legislator demanded and that corresponds to the facts of the case. The EU has also determined that the quality of the ecotoxicological data is insufficient for an appropriate assessment.

The EU must now continue to work on this consistently and responsibly. Only in this way can risks to humans and the environment be avoided against better judgement, in the knowledge of major gaps in knowledge and against the EU’s own standards.

Anyone who bans the very targeted use of insecticides in seed coating and pelleting for precautionary reasons must clearly analyse and weigh up whether the large-scale application of similar insecticides in the fields is really the more environmentally friendly method. There must always be a comparison of similar effective and available methods.

Emergency authorisations in individual EU countries, which turn out to be illegal years later but have given farmers in individual countries an advantage in a free market, are not an alternative. Fairness is only possible if there are better alternative methods and not if one simply hopes that it will work without the measure. If this were the case, farmers would do without a lot of crop protection.

The precautionary principle applies to the environment, to people’s health, but also to the economic viability of agriculture. There will always have to be trade-offs. However, legal and political decisions will have to shift if the risks are greater than previously estimated and technical alternatives become simpler and more efficient.

It is also not purposeful, for example, to simply return to cultivating and ploughing to reduce the use of glyphosate in cover crop and weed control, with all the undesirable side effects for humus, soil structure of many soils, soil life, erosion and energy consumption. Here, too, it is important to look ahead to new, better methods and not to return defensively to methods that have been replaced by glyphosate for good reasons.

Neither hoping for the future, nor leaving things out, nor going back to old methods are solutions. Realistic and effective methods to solve the real problems in the fields are needed.

crop.zone is doing its part and working on sustainable methods of crop management without chemical herbicides, including for cover crops and weeds (= wrong plant in the wrong place at the wrong time in too large a quantity), so that farmers and legislators have more innovative solutions at their disposal as economic alternatives. After all, crop protection and plant control always take place in the field and need technological progress there.