Although the pesticide regulation (Regulation 1007/2009) was put into force in 2011 and mandates to regulate the use of pesticides with endocrine disrupting properties, the criteria that define endocrine disrupting pesticides are still missing. In June 2014, the Commission published a Roadmap that outlines the different options considered by the regulators for the definition, criteria and regulatory decision-making of endocrine disruptors. Most of the options considered fail to include all knowledge from the field of endocrine disruption research, as explained in PAN Europe’s position paper on the roadmap , and thus will inevitably jeopardize the effectiveness of the Pesticide regulation to protect human and the environment from exposure to chemicals that interfere with their hormonal system.
In the current report, PAN Europe has conducted a research to assess what will happen in the approval of pesticides, if the provisional criteria for endocrine disrupting pesticides are applied. As provided by Regulation 1007/2009, Art. 4, any assessment, leading to an approval of pesticides, needs to be done based on current scientific and technologic knowledge. And this is exactly what we've done, we have collected all available research, studies and reports, no matter from what source (independent literature or industry’s dossiers), and developed a database with >800 documents that contains all current scientific knowledge on endocrine disrupting pesticides. Using this database we assessed the impact of the endocrine criteria on the approval of pesticides.