The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is on a mission to reduce its overwhelming backlog of fertilizer and supplement applications.
Luc Mougeot, acting national manager of the CFIA’s fertilizer program, said it is a top-to-bottom modernization initiative that will make Canadian farmers more competitive with their counterparts in the United States.
Long delays in getting new products approved have put Canadian producers at a disadvantage and are forcing technology innovators to look elsewhere to register their products.
The typical backlog at any given time is about 500 submissions waiting for label, efficacy and safety reviews. Applications often languish in the system for up to two years.
Read Also
Canola oil transloading facility opens
DP World just opened its new canola oil transload facility at the Port of Vancouver. It can ship one million tonnes of the commodity per year.
“As we modernize, it will mean shorter turnaround periods on product approvals, which will translate into greater access to new products and technologies,” said Mougeot.
The CFIA has doubled the number of staff dedicated to the fertilizer program to 26 from 13. Within one year the agency wants to cut the number of submissions in the queue in half, down to 200-300 applications.
Lloyd Affleck, a pulse grower from Beechy, Sask., applauds the initiative.
“The faster we can speed this up, whether it be fertilizer or any crop input product, we’re better served, definitely.”
But he said growers are more concerned about getting better and more timely access to crop protection products than to fertilizers and inoculants, so he encourages the federal government to broaden the scope of its modernization exercise to include the Pest Management Regulatory Agency.
Clyde Graham, vice-president of strategy and alliances for the Canadian Fertilizer Institute, said there are few applications for nitrogen, phosphate, potash and sulfur products waiting to be approved.
“Most of the backlog relates to some of the newer products that are coming on and becoming more popular, like inoculants, micronutrients, wetting agents and things like that.”
But once the CFIA is on top of the backlog it will have more time to devote to other pressing issues like regulatory reform, which will affect everybody in the fertilizer and supplement business.
Janice Tranberg, regulatory affairs director with Ag-West Bio Inc., said one example of the type of issue that needs to be addressed is how products seem to get to market much faster in the U.S.
South of the border products don’t have to be proven to be efficacious to achieve registration. If a product doesn’t work, producers simply won’t buy it again.
“They are letting the market be the driver,” she said.
In Canada, companies have to prove their product works well under a variety of conditions in multiple locations before they can get registration.
“You can see right there how quickly that adds up into cost and time,” said Tranberg.
A product that takes six months to get to market in the U.S. can take three years to commercialize in Canada. She noted that some of the changes being proposed may require an amendment to the Fertilizers Act.
“Maybe it’s good that we’re building a market that farmers can trust. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But there has to be a way to make this process quicker,” said Tranberg.
But Graham would rather tweak the current system than have wholesale changes requiring an act of Parliament.
“A lot can be done within the existing regulatory system through administrative measures and things like that,” he said.
Regulatory reform is a long way off. In the meantime, the CFIA will continue to chip away at the mountain of paperwork.
“Within a year from now we’ll be down to a manageable level again,” said Mougeot.
