Persistence and Change in EU Pesticide Law: Around and Beyond Pesticide Denialism

Pesticide pollution is a serious threat to biodiversity. Despite the alarm having been sound since at least from the sixties, pesticide toxicity has increased in the last decades. How does the EU legal order, which rests on the precautionary principle and aspires to attaining high level of environmental protection, respond to the challenges of pesticide pollution? According to many accounts, including by institutional actors themselves, EU rules on the sustainable use of pesticides are ‘too weak’. This article studies the hypothesis that the limited capacity of EU law to address pesticide pollution is related to the fact that European law and policy make it difficult to utter the negative environmental effects of pesticides in legal terms. In other words, the current European legal framework on pesticides renders environmental and public health impacts of pesticides (partly) ‘unspeakable’. To capture this phenomenon, we use the term ‘pesticide denialism’. This denialism starts with the very nomenclature of the main pesticide regulation in Europe (Regulation 1107/2009), where pesticides are first sanitized linguistically and called ‘plant protection products.’ The inability to ‘speak of’ something, in turn, translates into an incapacity to act. We test this hypothesis by studying EU legislation on pesticides (and its practical implementation) through the lenses of sociology of knowledge (particularly agnotology) and Law and Political Economy. Previous research focusing on Glyphosate has shown how EU laws on pesticides enact a ‘politics of separation’, through which evidence of the environmental effects of pesticides can be cut off from the decision-making process and pesticides are decontextualized ‘from their full effects on vulnerable populations and secondary interactions with other reactive elements in the environment’. Drawing on this and other research, we identify specific legal framings that disable the consideration of scientific arguments on pesticide toxicity. Next to mapping the legal junctures enabling pesticide denialism, we draw the attention to disruptive junctures where silencing mechanisms could be resisted. In particular, we focus on a set of recent cases before Dutch Courts where the use of pesticides has been challenged, and the administrative decisions allowing those pesticides successfully questioned. Among these, we refer to two cases in which it was decided that lily growers should stop using certain pesticides. Interestingly, the Courts considered evidence about the ‘cocktail effects’ when multiple substances are used, as well as evidence concerning the risk of neurogenerative diseases, arguments which have been typically marginalized by European assessment authorities such as EFSA and ECHA. Furthermore, some of the experts heard in these cases are scientists residing in the country/localities where the pollution is most felt. The article reflects on the disruptive potential of these rulings and, more generally, on the role of litigation before domestic courts as a site of resistance to pesticide denialism.