The European Union's talk of simplifying farm rules will be judged by whether farmers get the tools they need, writes Monica Teixeira, president of the European Crop Care Association (ECCA), which represents makers of post-patent crop protection products, in a column for AgriBusiness Global. The views are the writer's own.
Her subject is the Food and Feed Safety Simplification Omnibus, proposed by the European Commission in December 2025 as part of its Vision for Agriculture and Food. For off-patent products, she argues, the problem is that member states apply data protection rules differently, which prolongs uncertainty and delays market entry after protection has expired, leaving farmers with less competition, less choice and higher costs.
That matters more as climate change makes pest and disease pressure less predictable and active substances are withdrawn faster than new chemical or biological alternatives arrive. Farmers need to rotate products with different modes of action to manage resistance, and minor uses and specialty crops suffer most when the range shrinks.
Teixeira asks for three things in the final text: one EU-wide reference date for the start of data protection, tied to the EU regulation approving or renewing an active substance; safeguards so that reusing renewal data does not create a longer protection period than lawmakers intended; and a clear statement that provisional authorisations start the protection clock. She also proposes a central EU database of data protection periods.
She sees an opening in Ireland's Council Presidency in the second half of 2026, which puts simplification and the Single Market at the centre of its agenda. Success, she writes, would show in "more predictable authorization pathways, fair competition once protection periods end, greater consistency between Member States and access to a broader range of effective solutions", without weakening scientific safeguards.
Photo: joost j. bakker / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Source: AgriBusiness Global
Comments
(0)