A review of the pesticide program called Own Use Import will soon recommend that farmers be allowed to continue importing cheaper chemicals for their farms.
Representatives of the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, pesticide manufacturers and users told MPs on the House of Commons agriculture committee last week that an announcement is imminent.
“The task force is very, very close to consensus on a package that will provide growers with access to competitively priced products while simultaneously achieving data protection for manufacturers,” PMRA executive director Karen Dodds told MPs June 8.
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The OUI program has been popular with farmers, who can save money by importing equivalent cheaper products from the United States. However, the program is under a cloud because of manufacturer complaints that their investment in developing data to support registration of their competing products wasn’t being protected and concerns that farmers who imported product were not always disposing of the containers properly.
A task force comprising PMRA staff, growers and manufacturers was set up late last year to find compromise that would allow the farmer-popular program to continue.
Dodds said agreement is close and farmers who like to use the program can be reassured it will continue.
Lorne Hepworth, president of the manufacturers’ lobby CropLife Canada, agreed.
“There will continue to be an own-use program but as part of the package, a modernization of the generic registration system in Canada and further headway in fast tracking of the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) harmonization,” he said.
It will be not just farmer own-use imports but “a larger pesticide competitiveness package.”
Roland, Man., wheat and corn producer Bob Bartley, a director of Grain Growers of Canada, told MPs it is important that the own-use program continue and that it become easier for farmers to get equivalency rulings from PMRA.
He said use of the personal import system last year saved farmers $2 per litre on a particular unnamed chemical product. Applied to a farm with slightly less than 3,000 acres, that could represent a saving of more than $9,000.
“When you consider this in light of the crunch that farmers face on declining prices, you begin to understand the reason that producers turned to such a program in record numbers in 2005,” said Bartley.
