The current EU approval of the active substance glyphosate expires in December 2022. In May 2019, the European Commission appointed four evaluating Member States acting jointly as 'rapporteurs' for the next assessment of glyphosate. This group, comprising France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden, is known as the Assessment Group on Glyphosate.
In December 2019, a group of interested companies made an application for the renewal of approval of glyphosate post-2022 to the Assessment Group, the Member States and the EU Commission. This application formally initiated the EU renewal process.
The technical dossier supporting the application, containing scientific studies and literature data, was formally submitted by the Glyphosate Renewal Group on 8 June 2020 to the Commission. As Ireland is not an applicant for the renewal of the glyphosate approval, there is no requirement for the submission of a technical dossier.
An admissibility check on the application will now be carried out by the Assessment Group on Glyphosate by the end of July this year and, if all the necessary requirements are met, it will have 12 months to evaluate all the data submitted and prepare a Renewal Assessment Report (RAR).
The dossier submitted by the companies will be made available to the public during the summer. The RAR will be submitted by the Assessment Group on Glyphosate to the EU Commission and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) for peer review by the Member States. At this stage, the RAR will be made available to the public.
All relevant comments will be carefully considered in the EFSA peer review process. This process will include the involvement of Irish experts and will commence in the second half of 2021. EFSA will send its conclusions to the European Commission, who will make a proposal on whether or not to reapprove glyphosate. Member State representatives on the EU regulatory committee dealing with pesticides legislation will vote on the Commission proposal and must reach a decision before the current approval of glyphosate expires on 15 December 2022.
As the renewal process is an EU process with formal public consultation, no separate national consultations are envisaged.
