Introduction

This chapter is a follow up to a previous paper in which a first attempt was made to address some of the institutional aspects of the European Commission Directive on drinking water. Whereas the previous paper, after a short theoretical introduction, focused mainly on the legal history of the Directive and its implementation in Italy, this chapter is devoted to the more theoretical question of what legal instruments can be used to avoid an accumulation of pesticides in drinking water. The current situation with drinking water is that the EU is using Directives to set strict quality standards to protect drinking-water supplies. Once these EU standards are set, the Member States have to implement them in their national systems. It has been shown that the current regulatory approach for pesticides is not functioning satisfactorily. The research by the ecotoxicology group has demonstrated that the current Italian approach of a ban on one pesticide (i.e. atrazine) is inefficient since it does not prevent an accumulation in drinking water of other pesticides. Moreover, the research has shown that the real problem with pesticides is not their toxicity, but more importantly the accumulation of potentially toxic elements in drinking water. The current regulatory approach gives the wrong incentives to pesticide manufacturers and to the users of the pesticides, the farmers. It does not lead to a reduction of toxic pesticide accumulation in drinking water.