Imagine trying to bake enough bread to feed an entire continent — without protecting the wheat from pests, fungi, or weeds. That’s the scale of the challenge Europe would face without crop protection products (CPPs). Today, we rely on them to prevent the loss of up to 40% of our global crop yields. Despite progress in breeding, digital tools, and biological control methods, the seed and agricultural sectors cannot — yet — do without these tools.
At the same time, we’re demanding more from agriculture: lower emissions, reduced chemical inputs, improved biodiversity, and resilience to climate extremes. To meet these expectations, farmers need access to better, safer, and more sustainable crop protection solutions. But the current approval process in Europe is simply too slow to keep up.
An Approval System That Can’t Keep Pace
Before any CPP can be used on European farms, it must go through a multi-step regulatory process. First, the active substance is assessed at the EU level — requiring a massive dossier of toxicological, environmental, and efficacy data. Then, each Member State must authorise the actual product for use on its territory, often demanding additional documentation or national-specific reviews.
While this system was designed to ensure safety and consistency, in practice it results in long delays, inconsistent outcomes across countries, and a heavy administrative burden. Many products face approval timelines of eight to 12 years. For a sector where pests evolve, climate changes, and innovation moves quickly, that’s a fatal lag.
To make matters worse, the pipeline of new approvals has all but stalled. It takes more than 10 years to approve a new conventional active substance and more than seven years for biocontrol products — compared to only two to three years outside the EU. Over the past six years, more than 80 active substances (both conventional and biopesticides) have been withdrawn from the market, with no new active substance approved in the meantime. This shrinking toolbox leaves farmers with fewer options for integrated pest management, less resilience in farming systems, and growing pressure on the limited tools that remain.
Other parts of the world, including North America and parts of Asia, manage to review and authorise new products much more efficiently — without compromising safety. Europe’s lengthy and unpredictable timelines are increasingly out of step.
Innovation Is Left Waiting
The real cost of delay is that many of the most promising, sustainability-oriented CPPs never make it to market — or arrive too late. These include biologically derived products, low-dose chemistries, or precision-applied solutions designed to protect beneficial insects and reduce residues.
They’re exactly the kind of innovations that support Europe’s own ambitions under the Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy. But when the approval process is this sluggish, developers are discouraged, investment is diverted elsewhere, and farmers are left using outdated tools.
When Cheaper Means Sticking with the Old
The delays don’t only affect new products. Generic CPPs — off-patent copies of existing active substances — also have to go through the same complex approval procedures. These products tend to be cheaper and more accessible, which helps farmers facing rising input costs.
But this creates a dilemma. Given the choice between an older, well-known product at a lower price and a newer product that’s still caught in regulatory purgatory or carries a higher cost, many farmers will understandably stick with the familiar. This slows the adoption of more sustainable practices — not because of resistance to change, but because of systemic inertia.
Modernising the Process
The call isn’t for lower safety standards. Europe has every right to set a high bar. But safety and speed are not mutually exclusive. It’s entirely possible to uphold rigorous scientific review while also streamlining processes, improving coordination among Member States, and sticking to legally mandated timelines.
Some of the changes that could help include:
- Enforcing the current approval deadlines more strictly.
- Reducing duplication between national and EU-level reviews.
- Establishing fast-track procedures for lower-risk or sustainability-enhancing products.
- Increasing resourcing for regulatory authorities to reduce backlogs.
Encouragingly, adapted legislation and dedicated pathways are being considered to accelerate approval times, and the upcoming EU Omnibus package is expected to provide more clarity.
A Time-Sensitive Challenge
Sustainability isn’t a static goal — it’s a race against time. Every season of delay means older tools remain in use, resistance pressure builds, and newer technologies are sidelined. Europe’s farmers are ready to innovate. But they need a regulatory system that moves at the speed of their challenges.
Slowness in the approval pipeline doesn’t just hold up products. It holds up progress. If Europe is serious about sustainable agriculture, it must fix the system that’s meant to deliver it.
