Canadian commodity groups would like future free trade agreements to include a clause saying the partners accept the results of global joint reviews on pesticides.
Poor countries used to rely on Codex, a United Nations body, to establish maximum residue limits (MRLs) for pesticides.
However, Codex is way behind schedule, leading to massive delays in reviews of chemistries.
More countries are dropping Codex as they are lifted out of poverty and are instead creating their own MRLs.
“The problem is that the people who are making these decisions and moving that ball forward are typically health authorities that have no mandate for trade,” said Gord Kurbis, director of market access and trade policy with Pulse Canada.
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“So they could be setting up major trade barriers and not even knowing it.”
The list of jurisdictions that have dropped Codex includes South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, he told delegates attending CropSphere 2015.
Others moving in that direction are United Arab Emirates, Mexico and India.
“In many cases, we don’t know what the tolerances are as they transition away from Codex towards their own national lists,” said Kurbis.
“This could be a problem in the future when we go into an environment where more countries have their own custom systems and we have testing that is more sensitive.”
Canada has created an MRL task force made up of a wide cross-section of grower groups, government departments and pesticide manufacturers to help address potential looming MRL trade barriers.
The group hasn’t released official position statements, but one of the things that has been discussed is the need to have clauses in future free trade agreements stating that the parties agree to accept results from global joint reviews on pesticides.
“This is a relatively new approach, but it’s one we think we need to move towards,” Kurbis said in an interview following his presentation.
The task force would also like to see interim acceptance of other jurisdictions’ MRLs while waiting for the approval process to be completed.
That way, they could avoid situations like the one that arose in 2011 when it was discovered that the European Union had never established an MRL for glyphosate in lentils, so it had to apply the near-zero-tolerance default MRL of 0.1 parts per million.
“Lentil trade continued, but there were some hiccups and disruptions,” said Kurbis.
After a quick review, the EU increased the MRL to 10 parts per million, which gave exporters such as Canada more breathing room.
Kurbis said the problem is not the approvals themselves but their timing. Long delays can cause costly trade disruptions, especially with world trade in cereals, pulses and oilseeds expected to double to 600 million tonnes a year by 2050.
“There is an opportunity to get 21st century trade rules in place before trade doubles inside a generation,” he said.
sean.pratt@producer.com
