Canada and the United States have begun to work more closely to review pesticides proposed for registration.
Two chemical products are being jointly reviewed in a pilot program by Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
The new degree of co-operation and co-ordination promises faster registration and lower costs for the regulatory agencies and the chemical manufacturers.
The first herbicide in the process is Distinct, a BASF product designed to control annual and broadleaf weeds in corn.
“This moves it up a whole year for us in Canada,” said Bob McAuley, BASF communications manager.
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“We had planned to launch this product in the year 2000 in Canada and now with the joint review we expect to launch it in 1999.”
Novartis has a fungicide, Cytrodinil, for apples, cherries and peaches also in the pilot program.
Lobby pays off
The joint review is the result of lobbying by farm groups in the early 1990s for reduced red tape for pesticides and as an outcome of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Wayne Ormrod, chief registrar of the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, said the move makes sense.
“The chemical industry today is virtually global. The types and kinds of scientific information that are required to assess safety and effectiveness of pesticides is pretty standard. You’ve got to have health testing and environmental testing and so on.
“So rather than have the Canadian authorities reviewing in many cases identical information in terms of toxicology studies … it makes sense to me to split that work. If you do half and I do half, the theory is that we would get the job done in half the time and at half the cost to you and half to me.”
Only products considered to be of reduced risk are being used in the pilot. They are products that are specific in nature and do not have wide application.
However, the long-term objective is to make joint reviews standard operating practice for pesticide registration in North America.
Ormrod said Mexico has not yet been involved in the process.
He added that streamlining of the process is not causing one country’s standards to be lowered to meet the other’s. The main aspect of joint review is in laboratory toxicology trials.
“In residue trials, environmental trials, they have a local flavor attached to them,” he said, explaining conditions on the Prairies are much different than in California.
To handle this, the map of Canada and the U.S. has been divided into similar soil and climate areas that are considered equal. So a residue test in the northern plains is considered applicable to the Canadian Prairies, but not a test done California, he said.
