What’s the goal of the Food and Feed Safety simplification package?
The Commission has an ambitious simplification agenda for this mandate, to make Europe’s regulatory environment more competitive, resilient and supportive of today’s high food safety standards. A series of simplification packages – Omnibuses – have been prepared to implement this simplification process across all policy areas.
The Food and Feed Safety simplification package will reduce unnecessary administrative burdens and costs for producers, companies, operators and authorities, while maintaining very high safety standards. It removes overlaps in requirements and reporting, eliminates unnecessary procedures and enables the use and adoption of digital information tools where possible.
The simplifications will free up Member States’ resources to focus on areas of higher-risk and will improve predictability for farmers and economic operators. It is expected to improve the competitiveness and resilience of EU food and feed systems, by creating a legal framework that is more agile and allows operators to adapt and innovate, invest and grow.
The Food and Feed Safety simplification package is part of the strategy announced in the Vision for Agriculture and Food and draws on extensive feedback from Member States and stakeholders.
How much are the proposed simplification measures expected to save EU businesses and farmers?
The cumulative savings for businesses from the proposed measures in the simplification package should be €428 million a year, according to the Commission’s estimations. These savings come from reduced administrative burden and lower compliance costs, a more supportive environment for innovation, quicker market access and potential new market opportunities for certain products. The simplifications will be especially helpful for small and medium-sized businesses.
Additionally, national administrations are expected to save €661 million annually thanks to more streamlined and efficient procedures.
Thanks to better availability of products, farmers will also benefit from today’s proposal because they will have access to a wider range of choices to grow healthy crops. They will enjoy simpler rules while safeguarding the same high level of animal and plant health and animal welfare.
How does the Omnibus propose to simplify rules for pesticides?
The simplification package tackles key problems that were revealed in an extensive evaluation of the EU’s pesticides legislation; for example, systematic delays in conducting scientific assessments to approve and renew approvals of active substances and poor mutual recognition of plant protection product authorisations amongst Member States.
Regarding pesticides, today’s proposal:
- makes our approvals system more agile and reactive by removing the requirement for the systematic renewal of many active substance approvals based on time (excluding the most hazardous), with renewals and targeted reassessments carried out on substances when there are scientific reasons to do so;
- encourages uptake and development of more sustainable pesticides through establishing a simpler procedure to identify low-risk active substances;
- enables farmers to have a wider choice for plant protection products with simpler procedures for basic substances (e.g. vinegar, mustard seed powder, baking powder) for plant protection and accelerating the authorisation of products containing substances targeting particularly damaging pests.
- provides technical and scientific support from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to the Member State leading a risk assessment, to significantly reduce delays and provide clarity more quickly on necessary risk-management options;
- facilitates the authorisation of low-risk pesticides in multiple Member States, to create more equal availability of such products for farmers;
- sets out how the Commission will identify certain types of drones for spraying pesticides, with potential to lower the exposure of humans and the environment to pesticides compared to land-based spraying.
How does the package propose to simplify rules for bio-pesticides?
A key aim of the package is to lessen the barriers to bio-pesticides reaching the market. Although these substances are in general less toxic than synthetic chemical pesticides, there are still long delays in the assessment of applications for these products, due to lack of resources and divergent national practices, which in turn reduces incentives for these innovative products and leads to sales losses for companies.
Today’s proposal sets an EU-wide definition of biocontrol active substance and creates a process to accelerate their assessment and authorisation, including:
- a requirement on Member States to prioritise applications for these products and the possibility to grant provisional authorisations while assessment procedures are ongoing
- reinforced mutual recognition provisions and an option to choose the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) for the initial safety assessment, of an active substance rather than a Member State. EFSA will receive additional resources for this task.
This will facilitate farmers’ access to less toxic and more environmentally-friendly products to protect crops from pests.
What has been proposed on biocidal products?
The EU has rules to ensure the safety of biocidal products, which control harmful organisms such as viruses, bacteria, fungi, rodents and insects. The accompanying review process of their active ingredients has so far been slow due to issues such as a lack of staff and expertise in national authorities, and complex scientific questions that need to be resolved. This has created problems for companies, which face uncertainty and delays in getting their products approved.
In July 2025, Commissioner Várhelyi held an Implementation Dialogue with key stakeholders, to discuss how the rules and procedures for biocidal products could be improved. Today’s omnibus proposes to replace the systematic review of all active ingredients that are already approved with a more efficient system to free up resources. This will help finalise the remaining first assessments of existing active substances and reduce costs for companies, without compromising safety of human health or the environment. The proposed change is expected to save companies around €71.5 million per year, according to Commission figures. A thorough evaluation of the applicable legislation on biocidal products is also underway, with a view to examining how it could be substantially improved in the future
How does the simplification package propose to simplify rules for feed additives?
An evaluation of the Feed Additives legislation in 2024 identified several areas for improvement. In particular, the requirement to renew authorisations every 10 years, along with certain procedures to modify authorisations, were found to be burdensome and resource intensive. Labelling rules for feed additives did not reflect the potential of digitalisation for non-safety information and were creating inconsistencies and additional burden.
Today’s proposal addresses these issues by removing the renewal requirements, apart from higher risk substances, and simplifying the process for modifying existing authorisations. If any evidence arises that would call the safety or efficacy of the products into question, a review will be immediately triggered. Companies will also be able to provide certain non-safety information via digital labelling, instead of on the physical label. This will make it easier for them to update that information when needed and reduce the costs of changing physical labels.
What measures are proposed for livestock farming?
Currently, Member States have to submit annual reports on depopulation operations, to show they are in line with EU animal welfare rules. However, these reports overlap with other reports required under the Official Controls legislation, which already provides information to verify compliance with the animal welfare requirements. These specific depopulation reports are therefore of limited value in practice. The package will remove this overlapping requirement, thereby reducing the administrative burden for national administrations while maintaining welfare standards. Certain record-keeping rules will also be streamlined for livestock farmers, to remove duplications.
What simplifications are proposed for border controls?
Currently, when imports arrive at our borders, border control posts are not permitted to release a compliant part of a consignment if checks are still needed on another part of it. This can lead to delays in trade and the spoiling and waste of perishable goods, with huge costs for the operators.
Today’s proposal would allow consignments of plants and plant products to be partially cleared at the border, so that the compliant part could be put on the market while controls continue on the rest. This would ease the pressure on the border authorities, increase predictability for importers and operators and limit food waste caused by goods perishing while awaiting checks. The Commission estimates that this measure would reduce avoidable losses of fruit, vegetables and cut flowers by around € 150 million a year.
O artigo foi publicado originalmente em European Commission.
