Locked-In to Pesticide Dependence: An Analysis of Law-Making Processes Behind European Union Pest Management Transitions The Proposal for a Regulation on the sustainable use of plant protection products (SUR) represented one of the most serious attempts to address the deleterious health and environmental impacts of pesticides in the European Union (EU). Despite the EU’s stance on pesticides as pollutants, and the political support by the European Commission for the SUR, it was voted down by the European Parliament in late 2023. While the SUR would have been the first binding legal instrument to set specific targets on the total amounts of pesticides used throughout the European Union within a more comprehensive food system context, its absence leaves us the existing regulatory framework for pesticides, which institutionalizes pesticide use as the main pest management strategy. Given the likelihood that much-needed future pesticide policies and regulations will follow in the SUR’s footsteps, the dynamics surrounding the drafting and voting down of the proposal provide an interesting case study for exploring how European law-making processes ‘lock’ food systems into unsustainable behaviours like pesticide dependencies. To this end, this article, using critical discourse analysis, identifies the narratives deployed to obstruct the pest management transition and details how overarching power dynamics manifested within the SUR’s law-making process to uphold lock-ins that reinforce capitalist resource-intensive approaches to agriculture.
Daniela Garcia-Caro (Mon,) studied this question.