IFOAM Organics Europe and European Citizens’ Initiative condemn “fake pesticide reduction”
Methodologies are a political choice: Harmonised Risk-Indicator (HRI-1) misleads EU citizens and harms organic agriculture
BRUSSELS/VIENNA, 30 SEPTEMBER 2024 – Five months after the European Commission withdrew its proposal to halve pesticide use and risk by 2030, it released a statistic on 8 July 2024 claiming that the EU had already reduced pesticide use by 46%, nearly reaching its 50% reduction target.
- In a webinar, the European organic movement, the European Citizens’ Initiative Save Bees and Farmers and GLOBAL 2000 (Friends of the Earth Austria) examined this data. They showed that methodologies and indicators are a political choice as this reduction is a statistical trick due to the use of a flawed measurement tool – the Harmonised Risk Indicator 1 (HRI-1). Concretely: Calculations by the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA), show that pesticide sales in the EU have stagnated during the period in which the numbers show a 46% reduction;
- There was no decline in the use of more hazardous pesticides classified as “candidates for substitution”;
- The European Court of Auditors has also criticised the deceptive nature of HRI-1. According to the auditors, the HRI-1 shows “a risk reduction that is mainly due to lower sales of the substances in the category ‘not approved’” and should be replaced by “better risk indicators”.
“The citizens of Europe want to see a reduction in pesticide use. This was made clear through Eurobarometer surveys, the Conference on the Future of Europe, and our successful European Citizens’ Initiative, Save Bees and Farmers,” said Dr. Martin Dermine, spokesperson for the initiative. “It is a shame that the European Commission has abandoned its plans for pesticide reduction and is instead using a deceptive indicator to present a ‘fake reduction’ to the public, while the opposite is happening on the ground.”
A second equally problematic aspect of HRI-1 is the systematic discrimination against natural substances such as vegetable oils, sulfur, or sodium hydrogen carbonate, which are used as alternatives to synthetic chemical pesticides – and in organic farming represent the only permissible option for “chemical” plant protection. In this context, the HRI-1 provides some grotesque results:
“If an organic farmer treats aphids with a plant protection product based solely on rapeseed oil, the HRI-1 calculates a risk over 1,000 times higher than if a conventional farmer treats the same area with a synthetic neurotoxin that is highly toxic for bees. This not only presents dangerous substances as harmless – and vice versa, but it is also a form of misinformation about organic farming” explained Maria Zintl, Senior Policy Officer on Inputs and Organic Textiles at IFOAM Organics Europe.
A better indicator exists
“To offer the Commission and the Member States an alternative to replace the HRI-1, we have, as part of a collaborative project with IFOAM Organics Europe, developed an indicator that reflects the risks associated with different natural and synthetic pesticide active substances in a meaningful way and provides an assessment of trends in their use and risks of pesticides with reasonable confidence”, says Helmut Burtscher-Schaden, pesticide expert at GLOBAL 2000 and initiator of the project.
The main strength of the indicator presented today is that it avoids the systematic disadvantage of active substances of plant or mineral origin as a result of their significantly higher application rates. Unfortunately, this discrimination against natural pesticides is a feature of many established pesticide indicators that express pesticide use in terms of the quantity of pesticide active substances sold, rather than the area that can be treated with these substances.
The organisations are jointly calling on the Commission to immediately stop the misleading representations and disinformation about HRI-1 and to introduce an alternative indicator as soon as possible. “The indicator presented today could serve as a blueprint for this,” say IFOAM Organics Europe, Save Bees and Farmers, and GLOBAL 2000: “Amidst the biodiversity and climate crisis, our nature and the people of Europe – especially farmers – need a genuine reduction in pesticides.”
The organisations have been pointing out the deceptive character of the HRI- 1 for the past two years in letters to and meetings with the Commission, as well as at public events (in June 2022 and October 2023) in the last two years.
