Reconsidering EU Pesticide Policy to Address Sustainability

In January 2024, widespread farmer protests across Europe exposed growing tensions between the socioeconomic realities of agricultural production and environmental policy ambitions. Among the most contested issues, pesticide use emerged as a critical friction point, symbolizing broader dilemmas at the intersection of environmental sustainability, food security, and farmers' livelihoods. In response, the European Commission launched the Strategic Dialogue on the Future of EU Agriculture, a participatory platform aimed at fostering consensus among diverse stakeholders and redefining the direction of EU agricultural policy. This paper explores the Strategic Dialogue's contribution to shaping EU pesticide policy through a qualitative content analysis of its final report, triangulated with official stakeholder statements and EU policy documents. Focusing on the discourse on pesticide reliance reduction, sustainability trade-offs, and policy implementation challenges, the analysis applies a deductive-inductive coding framework to investigate the Dialogue's effectiveness in promoting deliberative governance and how the competing priorities were negotiated within the participatory process. The findings indicate broad stakeholder support for synthetic pesticide use reduction and restoring ecological balance, alongside recognition of the knowledgebased, structural, and economic barriers that hinder the transition. The report advocates a phased reduction strategy, supported by targeted financial support for small-scale farms and an increased investment in sustainable alternatives such as biocontrol and Integrated Pest Management. Furthermore, the analysis underscores the importance of ensuring balanced stakeholder representation and addressing power asymmetries in participatory policymaking. The paper contributes to understanding the potential of the Strategic Dialogue's initiative to generate cooperative responses to complex agri-environmental challenges by situating pesticide policy within the wider framework of deliberative sustainability governance.