The European Commission has once again postponed its decision on the vote for the renewal of glyphosate.
The meeting by the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed (SCoPAFF) on Thursday morning (9 November) at the European Commission followed an initial round of votes by Member States that commenced on October 25, which failed to come to a conclusion.
Following the lack of a qualified majority of the Member States on the proposal of the European executive, the decision will now be referred to the appeal committee, which will announce its decision by the end of November.
This procedure is foreseen in cases where there is no agreement between the Member States. This committee can only examine the proposal which has been formulated by the European Commission and not a new one.
Following the abstention of Germany (which represents 16% of the European population), the Member States failed to gather a qualified majority.
A qualified majority is when a proposal wins approval (or rejection) from 55% of the European Union countries, representing at least 65% of the population.
Expiry date
Member States now only have five weeks left before the expiry of the current glyphosate license on December 15. The European Commission is struggling to gather the qualified majority needed to make a decision.
The 14 countries that voted in favour of the proposal (representing 36.95% of the vote) were: the UK, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Hungary, The Netherlands, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden and Lithuania.
Nine countries voted against the proposal (representing 32.26% of the vote). These were Belgium, France, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta and Austria.
Five countries abstained (representing 30.79% of the vote): Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, Portugal and Romania.
Source: farminguk.com
