EU plans to regulate hormone-damaging chemicals found in pesticides have been dropped because of threats from the US that this would adversely affect negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), according to a report in The Guardian. Draft EU regulations would have banned 31 pesticides containing endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that have been linked to testicular cancer and male infertility.

Just after the official launch of the TTIP negotiations on 13 June 2013, a US business delegation visited EU officials to demand that the proposed regulations governing EDCs should be thrown out in favour of a further "impact study." Minutes of the meeting on June 26 show Commission officials saying that "although they want the TTIP to be successful, they would not like to be seen as lowering the EU standards." Nonetheless, the European Commission capitulated shortly afterwards.

That climbdown was despite repeated promises from the European Commission that TTIP would not jeopardise EU health and safety standards. For example, a Commission factsheet on Pesticides in TTIP from February 2015 states: "TTIP will not lower the food safety standards for pesticides." The Guardian report demonstrates that plans to strengthen regulations governing EDCs were blocked, which is equivalent to a lowering of future standards that would have been introduced had it not been for TTIP.

As well as giving the lie to assurances that health and safety would not be compromised in order to reach an agreement on TTIP, the European Commission's move makes no sense from a purely economic standpoint. The claimed benefit from an "ambitious" TTIP agreement is £100 billion in 2027. According to "the most comprehensive study of the subject yet published," the health costs of EDCs to Europe are between £113 billion and £195 billion (between €160 and €277 billion) every year. Tackling EDCs with more stringent safety rules could potentially provide a far bigger boost to the EU economy than even the most optimistic—and unrealistic—predictions for TTIP. And yet the European Commission decided it was more important to appease the US than save money or protect EU citizens.

This is not the first time that the European Commission has been willing to sacrifice EU regulations in order to facilitate trade agreements. Alongside TTIP, the Commission has been negotiating a similar trade and investment deal with Canada, known as the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). One of Canada's key negotiating aims was to promote the use of its tar sands in Europe. In 2012, the EU's Fuel Quality Directive (FQD) proposed that tar sands should be given a 20 percent higher carbon value than conventional oil. This reflected the greater pollution caused by its production and was designed to steer companies away from using this particular form of fuel in the EU. However, a few weeks after CETA was concluded, the final version of the FQD had been watered down and lacked the earlier requirement that companies needed to account for the higher emissions from tar sands, effectively neutering it—exactly as Canada had demanded.