One of the recent polls on this website was: The costly and time consuming new EU 'Feed Additive Regulation (1831/2003)' makes it impossible for small companies to compete on the feed additives markets.
I personally agree with this statement and so did 83.3% of our website visitors. 16.7% disagrees with it. The background of these votes can not be tracked unfortunately; otherwise you could see whether the "optimistic voters" are employed with big companies (facing less financial problems) and if the 83.3% are coming from smaller companies. Nevertheless, from many people I understand that getting a product registered takes time and accurate judgement of the dossier. However, it surprises me that it can take up to 8 years to go receive final registration for a product. Obviously, the time involves makes the registration such a costly matter; time is money. 

Still positive besides some critism
At the latest Fresenius Conference on Feed Additives, held in Darmstadt, Germany, the attendees agreed that an acceptable registration time would be around 3 years. Another point if discussion is whether the functional groups within the new regulation are well chosen. Some attendees of the Conference could not figure out what the functional group 'gut flora stabilisers' holds. We know that certain feed additives have a positive effect on the gut (such as probiotics), but do they really stabilise it? Fundemenatal research in probiotics (mode of action, efficacy, safety) is still undertaken. Anyway, besides all the criticism, most of the attendees present at the Conference agreed that the new regulation is a definite improvement compared to the old one, and Europeans have to live with it. At the same time, non-EU countries are often forced to live with these rules as well, to safeguard their export markets. However, whether such feed regulation will be adopted in other parts of the world remains to be seen. I think it will take another few years before that will happen.