EU omnibus regulation on food and feed safety/
Comments welcome until March 30

In line with its Vision Paper, which brings a new focus onto imported products to make sure they match EU standards, the EU released its omnibus regulation package on 16 December 2025, aiming to simplify and strengthen food and feed safety requirements across multiple areas including GMOs, animal feed, live animals, pesticide MRLs, and more.

Key aspects of the regulation for the trade:

• Faster approvals for least hazardous pesticides.
• Less burdensome renewal processes.
• Fast-track procedures for least harmful products.
• Flexible transitional measures when MRLs are lowered, potential permanent MRLs from monitoring data, and case-by-case LOQ settings for highly hazardous substances.

• Revocation or reduction to 0.01 LOQ for a huge number of active substances, applied equally to imports
• Aligns with the EU Vision Paper's push for imported products to match EU standards and do not include any hazardous pesticides at levels not accepted in EU, including a planned 50% increase in import controls.

The GPC-Gafta Market Access Committee has collaborated with other sectors including IOSTA, European Coffee Association, and European Spices Association on joint letters, including a December pre-publication letter to EU Cabinets calling for trade impact assessments. A DG Sante response has been received and a follow-up letter on the Omnibus is in draft. 

In its letters, the group of associations reminds the EU of the importance of the study planned this summer to look at the impact on international trade and EU competitiveness and supports case-by-case assessments of active substances. The core message is that MRLs remain science-based and WTO-compliant and the need for long transitional periods for all the changes, with a proposal for three years seen as positive.

Action required

The EU notified the regulation to the WTO (G/SPS/N/EU/911) on 29 January 2026. The EU is notifying trading partners that comments are welcome until 30th March 2026 and that the regulation is expected to enter into force six months after publication date. GPC is planning to submit joint SPS comments by 20 March along with other associations 

Comments can be shared to GPC for inclusion in joint letter to SPS: lara@globalpulses.com, or directly to SPS: sps@ec.europa.eu

Full details: Omnibus I, WTO Notification, Joint letter EU import tolarance, Reply DG Sante