Report on Proceedings of the Workshop on Alternative Business Models for Pesticide Reduction

Plant pests and diseases can cause considerable impacts on crop yields, and in turn food and feed security. Pesticides are one of the most frequent tools used to control or eliminate these pests and diseases playing a crucial role to assure food security. However, pesticide use also leads to undesired environmental and health impacts. The European Commission´s Joint Research Centre organized a workshop in November 2023 to explore innovative alternative business models that are emerging to facilitate reductions in pesticide use and risk while minimizing impacts in food security. This report summarizes the contributions presented at the workshop covering the legislative framework for pesticide reduction, theoretical considerations on pesticide reduction behaviour, examples of new technologies and business models being developed and insights from research on their potential to facilitate the transition to a low-pesticide use agriculture. The overall message stemming from the workshop is that outcome-based services and insurance policies can be key tool to enable farmers to achieve this reduction. However, the existing empirical evidence of the performance of these tools is still very scarce and these new business models still have to show their potential when upscaling from pre-commercial stage.