The EU Food and Feed Safety Simplification Omnibus is another of the European Commission’s attempts to fast-track legislation it claims will reduce administrative burden and increase competitiveness. As has been the case previously, many in civil society and the scientific community are worried that changing so many of the rules on food and feed so fast will do more harm than good. Oliver Moore reports.
Announced in December 2025, the Food and Feed Safety Package, also known as “omnibus X”, has a stated aim of reducing admin and compliance costs by the rather even number of €1 billion. This will be done “while maintaining the EU’s very strict requirements for food and feed safety, health and environmental protection,” the Commission stated in its December 2025 announcement.
The Omnibus sandwich
This Food and Feed Safety Omnibus is a package of three legislative proposals:
- a directive to simplify food and feed rules including on pesticide aerial spraying;
- a regulation amending multiple instruments touching pesticide approval, GM food and feed, animal welfare among others, and
- a regulation to extend data protection period for biocides under review.
The third proposal (for a narrower regulation) was already adopted in May. As regards the first proposal (for a directive), the Council adopted its position, mostly focusing on the “urgent” need for legislative change and further streamlining some of the proposals on aerial spraying.
And this is in many ways emblematic of the process: rapidly achieved certainty for businesses and users, but at what cost?
Digging into the dangers
But let’s look at the meat of the Omnibus X sandwich: the second proposal in the package – a broad-ranging regulation that has attracted broad criticism.
10 regulations are referred to by this proposal, on pesticides, residues, GMOs, feed additives, food hygiene, animal welfare and animal diseases.
A major sticking point is pesticides. Under the proposed regulation, many pesticide approvals could speed up considerably: while currently there is an independent risk assessment, then approval, then review every 15 years, the proposed new approach would change this.
Instead, approvals may become effectively open-ended, with reassessment triggered only when enough new evidence of risk emerges rather than occurring automatically at fixed intervals. A similar logic is proposed for biocidal active substances.
In other words, pesticides are approved open-ended, unless enough evidence can be garnered (by whom?) to challenge this.
Critics such as Pesticide Action Europe (PAN) say that this means “49 synthetic pesticides could automatically receive unlimited approval as of 1 January 2027. This includes glyphosate, acetamiprid and some PFAS pesticides.”
It also points to the burden shift over to civil society and science and away from industry, and the potentially increased use of derogations and longer grace periods of banned pesticides staying on the market.
Further, PAN points to the increased risk of pesticide drift linked to wider use of drones, and the curtailment of national authorities using the latest data – forcing them to rely instead on “older EU-level assessments”.
Groups such as Corporate Europe Observatory are calling on MEPs to stop dismantling EU pesticide laws, pointing out the many risks to human and ecosystem health.
An article in June in Science, by researchers from 27 European scientific institutions, says this omnibus “would amplify rather than resolve shortcomings of current environmental risk assessment. This would jeopardize the Omnibus’s goal to maintain high standards for the protection of human and environmental health.” The authors fear the weakening of incentives to develop safer alternatives alongside the undermining of trust in the regulatory process.
This follows an earlier scientific statement from December 2025 where over 200 scientists said similarly.
Still, plenty of appetite
It seems the meat of the sandwich is riddled with risks and warnings. Regardless, the Parliament is edging towards a position on this regulation. On Monday 6th July, the ENVI and AGRI committees moved forward with texts of co-rapporteurs Herbert Dorfmann (EPP) and Michele Picaro (ECR).
These texts further propose deregulations, involving rapid, wide-ranging and longer approvals, more caveats for retaining substances on the market and for longer, as well as increased ‘grace periods’ for pesticides due to be removed from the market.
For pesticides, co-rapporteurs propose extending the so-called grace period to retain substances on the market, which are due to be withdrawn, from 6 months to two years.
PAN has criticised these positions as “effectively abandoning around 200 ongoing renewal assessments, while also introducing unlimited national authorisations for products containing those substances.”
The NGO adds that these proposals “would make it easier and faster to approve highly harmful substances – such those that cause infertility, hormone disruption and other serious effects – through derogations based on socio-economic consideration.”
Parliament must adopt a final position at plenary, sometime after the summer, before a final overall position is then agreed with its co-legislator, the Council.
What’s the (real) problem?
An underlying, ongoing concern from civil society and others is that there are simply better ways to do these things than slashing the rules as a matter of principle.
It has also been revealed, if unintentionally, that there can be other ways to efficiently and accurately streamline the approvals process: hire more staff. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) director Nikolaus Kris said in leaked emails that with just €15 million and 50 additional staff, the approvals backlog could drop from eight years to three. For his part, Kris claims he was speaking generally and not directly referring to the Omnibus process.
