“Mr. chair, honourable members, Mrs. rapporteur, thank you very much for inviting us. My intervention will focus on aspects which are special for my DG, which is internal market and industrial competitiveness. Whenever we meet biotech companies and we meet them very often, we are very impressed. We are impressed by their innovative capacity. We are impressed by their ideas. We are impressed by their ambition. But whenever we meet them, we meet them because not only because we are pleasant people and they want to invite us because we are pleasant people, but mainly because they are unhappy. They are unhappy because very often they face obstacles to access to the single market, because they want to grow. They have got a good idea. They have got a lot of innovation in their portfolio, but they want to grow. They want to sell to this big single market that we have of 150 million people. But the problems are numerous and this is what they tell us. And it can give you 20 examples, but I'll give you a few, a few indications. For instance, what we hear from businesses is that, for instance, for biological plant protection products, the access to the market is very slow. Authorisation takes several years. 6 to 7 years is what the company tells us. Whereas in other trading blocs outside the EU it's much faster. They also say national authorities for plant protection products, for instance, lack sufficient resources to handle all these authorisations, which means that it takes a very long time to reach the market. Another example that we often hear is about fertilising products, where the fertilising products regulation, for instance, has only four types of micro-organisms that are allowed and where essentially there should be many more that should be allowed.”
EU policy on pesticides · Use of fertilisers · EU Single Market harmonisation
“And that's a problem also for the bio fertilisers and biostimulants sector. Another regular complaint that we hear from from businesses is about novel foods, they often say, but it takes so long to reach the market. It takes so long for us as a novel food to get the authorization and to go to the entire process of of the novel foods legislation and to get the authorization to, to, to, to, to go there and to sell our products. And then there's also another example is for instance, additives regulation, where also a number of companies complain that all the technical changes to additives regulation might also impede their access to the market. For a number of biotechnological products, the difficulty is always these are side effects of of of rules that are of good intentions, but sometimes have negative consequences on highly technological biotechnological solutions. Now, as a commission, we have already taken some steps to ensure that the single market for biotechnology is functioning much better. We've got the proposal, for instance, on NTS, for which thank you very much, Parliament, you already have confirmed your first reading position where progress in the Council is slow and in our view, too slow. We also have made a proposal on detergents where we will be allowing microbial cleaning products. And there also the Parliament is very ambitious and gives us full support. So also thank you for that. But nonetheless, the impression, the message that we are getting from enterprises is that we need to take further action. And here also, the president was very clear in her political guidelines. We need a union that is faster, that is simpler and that is more supportive for people and businesses.”