The MSCA project ´transformative regulation of chemical pesticide-based agricultural systems´ focuses on some of the key challenges involved in furthering European ambitions to begin phasing out many chemical pesticides and substituting them with non-chemical methods of pest and weed control. Those ‘path-breaking’ ambitions are set out as objectives in the European Green Deal´s 2019 Farm to Fork Strategy, and in Regulations and Directives from a decade earlier that set out new rules on how pesticides should be scientifically appraised, licensed and used. Those ambitions are important because widespread chemical pesticide use in agriculture is a key driver of the on-going collapse in global biodiversity, and poses significant threats to farm workers and consumers health. Crucially, the new transformative ambitions are an acknowledgment, at least implicitly, that existing regulatory purposes, and regulatory-scientific appraisal practices, in Europe, have failed adequately to protect biodiversity and human health.
The overall objective of the project was to understand how and why novel ambitions to prompt the substitution of chemical pesticides for alternative techniques of pest and weed control are being fostered and resisted, with a particular focus on the knowledge politics involved in (re)imagining the purposes of pesticide regulation, the problems it is designed to address, and the appropriate nature of regulatory-scientific appraisal practice. One way in which it does so is by characterising, and providing an explanation of, the historical evolution, in Europe and other industrialised countries, of institutionally dominant regulatory purposes and appraisal practices, from the early 20th century to date, along with the consequences of those incumbent purposes and practices for regulatory performance.
The project concludes that regulatory purposes have been dominated by relatively stable ambitions to support and optimise chemical pesticide-based agriculture, whilst regulatory practices everywhere have been characterised by a control oriented, reductionist, inflexible, technocratic approach to appraisal that is also subject to partial capture, especially of knowledge, and to constraints on the ability to develop new knowledge. Consequently, pesticide regulation in all industrialised countries has repeatedly struggled to identify, learn about, or respond adequately to the most serious harms posed by chemical pesticides.
It argues that those stable purposes and characteristics, in turn have been shaped by five core political economy and cultural drivers of chemical pesticide-dependent industrialized agricultural systems (which include regulatory arrangements), which this project terms: (i) Specialization – which provokes and exacerbates pest problems; (ii) Appropriation – which privileges chemical pest control solutions; (iii) War – which accelerates and entrenches chemical pesticide technologies (iv) Preclusion – which delays/undermines learning about chemical pesticide threats, and (v) Control – the misconception that chemical threats can be confidently anticipated, identified and managed.
