b'WHEN RED TAPE CHOKES GREEN PROGRESSEUROPES OUTDATED CROP PROTECTION APPROVALS ARE UNDERMINING ITS AGRICULTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL GOALS.BY: MARCEL BRUINSI magine trying to bake enough bread to feed an entire continentwithout protecting the wheat from pests, fungi, or weeds. Thats 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 inOver the past six years, more thanbreeding, digital tools, and biological control methods, the seed80 active substances have been and agricultural sectors cannotyetdo without these tools. withdrawn from the market, with noAt the same time, were demanding more from agriculture:new active substance approved.lower emissions, reduced chemical inputs, improved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 pro-tection solutions. But the current approval process in Europe is simply too slow to keep up.AN APPROVAL SYSTEM THAT CANT KEEP PACEBefore 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 levelrequiring a massive dossier of toxicological, environ-mental, and efficacy data. Then, each Member State must authorise the actual product for use on its ter-ritory, 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, cli-mate changes, and innovation moves quickly, thats 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 productscompared 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 Over the past six years, more than 80 active substances (both conventional and biopesticides) have been withdrawn from the market, with no new active substance approved in the meantime.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.24ISEED WORLD EUROPEISEEDWORLD.COM/EUROPE | NOVEMBER 2025'