CropLife Canada says the need for a predictable regulatory system has never been greater.
Janice Tranberg, the organization’s western Canadian vice-president, told the Breadbasket 2.0 conference that 33 biotechnology submissions have been made globally over the past 10 years.
“We expect that to increase in the next five to 10 years by three to five-fold,” she said.
Tranberg said CropLife member companies invest $5 billion a year, or 11 percent of their sales, on research and development and need a clear path to commercialization to protect that investment.
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“When we look at Canada’s regulatory system in the lens of the rest of the world, we are doing pretty darn good,” she said.
Companies are able to get their plant biotechnology and pesticide products through the system in a relatively predictable time frame. For the most part, they know what to do and how to do it.
However, she said the system needs to be tweaked occasionally to make it function better.
“There is one (government) de-partment that we’ve identified is a little bit slower than the other departments. I’m not going to say which one,” said Tranberg.
CropLife plans to get together with regulators to outline its concerns with that department and ask an independent party to make recommendations on how to fix them.
“If we do it in that approach, then hopefully we’ll get the buy-in,” she said.
“We’ll get the buy-in from regulators. We’ll get the buy-in from the industry. We’ll get the buy-in from the actual developers themselves.”
CropLife believes the Canadian government can play a leadership role by helping other countries streamline their regulatory affairs and pushing for global synchronization of approvals.
It also wants Ottawa to continue encouraging countries to adopt low level presence policies and common maximum residue levels for pesticides.
Tranberg said more bilateral and multilateral trade agreements are needed because they increase regulatory predictability.
Canada also needs to remain vigilant about protecting intellectual property rights because her member companies spend up to $150 million to bring a new trait to market and $250 million for a new pesticide.
