Lula decides to veto sections of the project on making the use of pesticides more flexible in the country – 12/26/2023 – Environment

President Lula (PT) decided to veto controversial sections of the project on making the use of pesticides more flexible in the country, according to assistants at Palácio do Planalto.

Dubbed by environmentalists as the Poison Bill, the text approved in Congress centralizes the registration of new products in the Ministry of Agriculture, depriving Anvisa (National Health Surveillance Agency) and Ibama (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) ).

By vetoing these points, the Lula government intends to reestablish the tripartite regulatory model for pesticide registration and control. According to government members, the veto prevents environmental and health assessments from being conducted exclusively by the Ministry of Agriculture, without technical knowledge for risk analysis.

The veto, however, places the environmentalist and ruralist wings of the government on opposite sides. The Ministry of Agriculture asked for the project to be fully sanctioned. The argument against the veto is that the tripartite model will cause a mismatch, with different deadlines for each body, and that Agriculture technicians would already take into account the analyzes from Anvisa and Ibama.

However, the veto of the superpower was defended by the ministries of Health, Environment, Labor and even Finance.

Government members are already predicting strong resistance from the ruralist group in Congress to this veto. The tendency is for the Agribusiness Parliamentary Front (FPA) to mobilize to resume the model that focuses on Agriculture the analysis for the release of pesticides. There is a fear in the sector that Ibama and Anvisa will postpone the evaluation of new products.

Another point to be vetoed is what allows agricultural pesticides under reanalysis, which currently have their application suspended, to be used even before the end of the process.

This veto also runs the risk of being overturned by the National Congress, since the project was the result of a political agreement between Lula’s allies and parliamentarians and was approved with the support of the significant ruralist bloc and the centrão.

The PL had been in progress in Congress since 1999, when it was initially presented by the former Minister of Agriculture and former governor of Mato Grosso Blairo Maggi, at the time a senator of the Republic.

The progress of the project was agreed upon during the government transition. At the time, when Congress turned off the lights in 2022, the Agriculture Committee (CRA) even put the proposal on the agenda.

In response, the then transition team agreed with agriculture that the government would not impede the progress of the matter in 2023, but would work to try to build an alternative, consensus text.

In the middle of the year, environmentalists and ruralists reached an agreement on the wording of the matter. The obstacle, at the time, was the withdrawal of temporary registration, a point that the leader of the PT in the Senate, Fábio Contarato (ES), managed to maintain until the final draft of the text.