The vote on the bill (PL) that makes the rules for approval and marketing of pesticides in Brazil more flexible was postponed again this Tuesday (29). Now, the topic should be discussed by the government transition team, whose members differ on the matter. On the one hand, sectors of agribusiness, including the PL’s rapporteur in the Senate, Acir Gurgacz (PDT-RO), defend changes. Members of the future government’s environmental area, including former sector ministers, are against flexibility.
“Look, [há] some points that we need to improve. There are five points on which it is better to move forward in the discussion, to see how it went and how it didn’t,” Gurgacz told journalists at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (CCBB), in Brasília, seat of the transitional government. The senator declined to detail the points that need improvement, but indicated that voting on the project may be resumed later this year.
The congressman, who chairs the Senate Agriculture and Agrarian Reform Commission, postponed the vote in the collegiate after appeals from senators from the environmentalist front. Last week, Senator Carlos Fávaro (PSD-MT), who is also part of the transition group and is in favor of the changes, stated that the PL “is ripe” to be voted on.
In February of this year, the Chamber of Deputies approved the bill, which then moved on to the Senate. The topic has been discussed for more than two decades. A member of the transition team, former Minister of the Environment Carlos Minc commented this Tuesday on the postponement of the vote and recalled that the text needs to undergo extensive debate in the Senate, according to a commitment assumed by the President of the House, Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD- MG).
“President Pacheco committed himself to us and spoke to the press of this commitment that he would not put it to a vote without going through all the committees and that this would be preceded by a hearing with scientists so that people would know what the consequences of this would be,” declared Minc. According to the former minister, the issue was taken to the PT president, Gleisi Hoffmann, who coordinates the area of political articulation of the transition. Minc was also expected to seek out former Minister of Health José Gomes Temporão to discuss aspects of the bill related to impacts on human health.
“The idea was to talk to this group so that the government could have a unique position. The idea is not to make it difficult, now, to remove restrictions on [agrotóxicos] proven mutagenic and teratogenic, and taking the environment and health out of the analysis of that is suicidal,” he added.
Understand
PL 1,459/2022 deals with research, experimentation, production, commercialization, import, export, final destination and inspection of pesticides. Since the beginning of the procedure, the matter has generated wide divergence among senators.
Among the measures provided for in the amendment are the concentration of decision-making power over pesticides in the Ministry of Agriculture and the change in the nomenclature of pesticides, which would be called, in the legislation, pesticide. Bodies such as the Ministry of the Environment and the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) would only have an advisory role in the analysis of these products, without veto or approval power.
The text also provides for the setting of a deadline for obtaining registrations of this type of product in Brazil — with the possibility of temporary licenses when deadlines are not met by Organs competent bodies — and the softening of the explicit classification of products harmful to human health and the environment.
