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Workshop "Pesticide Reduction Programmes in Germany and the UK – Experiences and Contributions within a Europe wide Approach"

01.09.2005, PAN Germany

On the 5th of July 2005 32 participants attended the workshop "Pesticide Reduction Programmes in Germany and the UK – Experiences and Contributions within a Europe wide Approach" in Hamburg in order to discuss the pesticide reduction policies in Germany and the UK against the background of the EU pesticide policy as well as experiences in some other European countries. The workshop was organised by PAN Germany and PAN UK in co-operation with PAN Europe.

In the first section ("Background") the European political framework for national pesticide policies and also the history of the development of pesticide reduction programmes in Europe were highlighted. The main topic of the second section was a detailed view of the official German and the official British pesticide reduction policies and in addition to have a look at these national policies from the retailers and from the farmer points of view. In the third section other European pesticide reduction experiences were taken into account (Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria). The final section served to draw conclusions.

Main conclusions of the workshop are that the pesticide reduction programmes in Germany and the UK are quite different and that therefore both countries can learn a lot from each other but on the other hand need to take into account that the national frameworks are too different to simply transfer "models". This conclusion was supported by the analyses of the contributions in the section "Elements for success – experiences in other European Countries" (for details see the documentation (pdf-file, 1,09 MB ).

Referring to both countries, Germany and the UK, further conclusions were:
  • there is a large potential for pesticide reduction even if agricultural production systems were not to be changed significantly;
  • conventional and organic farms should share their experiences more systematically in the future;
  • farmer advice systems need far more support to be effective regarding pesticide use reduction;
  • economic instruments (e. g. taxes) should be taken into account.

In addition it was agreed that the European Commission needs to set supportive standards to help encourage national pesticide reduction programmes. On the other hand, national pesticide reduction programmes have to be developed within their specific national framework which means that detailed blueprints produced in Brussels for national reduction programmes would not be appropriate.

The documentation can be downloaded as pdf-file under http://www.pan-germany.org/download/pure_con_0507.pdf (pdf-file; 1,09 MB).

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