Environmental risk of chemical agriculture - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 96

(1992). The decision that pesticide registration is regulated under the simplest zoni-
fication reflects on an attempt to create an easily maintainable registration system,
but it certainly does not comply with all legally existing ecological requirements. It is
predictable that corresponding legality conflicts may arise between the Pesticides Law
and the Habitats Directive.
The re-registration program of pesticide-active ingredients used in the EU has been
launched and regulated by Directive 91/414/EEC (Pesticide Law, 1991), having come
into force in 1993 and repealed 2009 by the new Pesticide Law (2009). The initial
number of active ingredients subject to the re-registration process was approximately
900, and later broadened to some extent. Of these compounds, 420 were notified
and 259 have been enrolled on the positive list until 2010. The number of withdrawn
compounds (700) consisted of those either rejected by the authorities or receded by
the notified owner. Rejected compounds, subject to withdrawal from distribution with
certain deadline allowances, are specified on a separate list. The current status of given
pesticide-active ingredients and products are available in the EU Pesticide Database of
the European Commission's Directorate General for Health and Consumer Policy (DG
SANCO, 2013). Maximum levels of pesticide residues of plant and animal origin in or
on food and feed are governed by a separate legal regulation, Regulation 396/2005/EC
(Pesticide Residues, 2005), which also applies to products of plant and animal origin
to be used as fresh, processed and/or composite food or feed.
The Pesticides Law strongly focuses on endocrine disrupting effects (as well as on
other exclusion criteria such as carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, reprotoxicity), extend-
ing the range of risk-based evaluation. Nonetheless, industrial chemical substances are
subject to regulations specified in EU Regulation 1907/2006 regarding registration,
evaluation and authorization of chemicals (REACH, 2006). Although pesticide-active
ingredients (but not other composites) are exempt from the requirements of REACH,
and the required ecotoxicological tests for pesticide-active substances in the Pesticides
Law are of the same extent as those in REACH in the case of industrial substances
manufactured or imported in quantities of at least 100 tonnes per year, numerous
anomalies occur between the two regulations (Németh & Székács, 2012). A substantial
contradiction in the evaluation is that biocides and pesticides are governed separately
(under REACH and the Pesticides Law, respectively), even though pesticides repre-
sent a special category of biocides. As a consequence, the same active ingredient can
be assessed differently when evaluated as a pesticide (agricultural application) or a
biocide (hygienic application). Moreover, a serious gap in consideration of endocrine
disrupting effects is the fact that there exist no current standardized criteria to assess,
per definition, whether a substance disrupts the endocrine system. The Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development is in the process of developing guidelines
for assessing endocrine disrupting effects (OECD, 2013), and the European Union has
set the end of 2013 as the deadline for establishing the definition of the phenomenon,
its assessment and testing.
3 ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF FERTILIZERS
AND PESTICIDES
Industrialized crop production results in the deterioration of soil quality, occurring in
a complex process. Excessive management practices (frequent deep plowing) increase