Growers fear funding cut will jeopardize pest control

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

The $6 million Ag Canada provides for pesticide registration is coming to an end and horticulturalists worry that this will hurt their competitiveness internationally

by SUSAN MANN

When a tiny pest from Asia called the spotted wing drosophila landed in Canada two years ago and began attacking thin-skinned fruit and berries, growers didn't have any registered pesticide products available to fight it.

Last year, growers in British Columbia secured an emergency registration from the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) for four insecticide products through a federal program designed to provide farmers with improved access to pesticides. This year, growers from Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Alberta also obtained emergency-use registration for products to control the insect.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada provided $6 million in funding annually from 2007 to 2011 to the Pest Management Regulatory Agency for the program, which is called Enhancing Access to Pest Control Products. But now this funding is ending and growers are worried they won't have access to the products they need.

In the case of the spotted wing drosophila, Craig Hunter, consultant with the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, says that "if we didn't have a program, we wouldn't be able to get the data and we wouldn't be able to get the registrations."

Pesticide use in Canada is regulated by the PMRA, which is part of Health Canada.

Health Canada spokesperson Olivia Caron says in an e-mail that the program is aimed at providing farmers with improved access to pesticides that are available in other countries in order to further Canada's competitiveness. "It has been credited with making significant gains in closing the technology gap (on pest control) between Canada and the Unites States," she writes.

In addition to providing funding, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada organizes an annual farmer priority-setting meeting during which growers outline what products they need to have registered for the specific insect, disease or weed problem they want to control.

Product data on items such as residues, efficacy and crop tolerance are gathered through the program, which also puts together applications for registration. The applications are then forwarded to PMRA, which reviews and makes a decision on them.

The $6 million a year from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada went to PMRA to do the work of reviewing the applications under the program. One of the program's benefits is that growers have been able get minor-use products registered. A minor use is a pesticide registration for which the anticipated sales volume isn't high enough for a manufacturer to register and sell the product in Canada. Horticultural growers generally require minor-use registrations to have access to new pesticides.

Another benefit to the program is that it has resulted in harmonized residue requirements "so that we can trade our treated commodities to other countries," Hunter says.

Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) officials first learned that money for the program is ending this year at the PMRA's economic management advisory council meeting in May. "We were never worried about losing this program until then because we saw how much good it was doing," Hunter says, noting that growers can't pay for this themselves.

Without the federal agriculture department funding, Hunter says the "activities at PMRA will slow down or stop" on minor-use products. Farmers consider the program to be extremely important and "we cannot allow the work to languish because Ag Canada's not providing that budget any more," he says. For horticultural farmers, the program is particularly important because they haven't had access to the same range of pesticide products as producers in other countries.

CFA president Ron Bonnett says the money was originally given to speed up the registration of some of the generic products. "There was a huge backlog of product that was waiting for approval," he notes. The money was also to be used for harmonization.

To some extent, the backlog was cleared up and "it's not nearly as bad as it was before," he says. "The big concern we might have is making sure there's funding available to ensure those products are approved as quickly as possible."

Health Canada's Caron says that "PMRA is finding efficiencies to allow for continued involvement in international regulatory co-operation." But Hunter argues that "finding those resources is going to be next to impossible."

In addition, all federal departments are facing budget cuts. George Bentley, media relations manager at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, says in an e-mail that departments have been asked to develop two scenarios – one with a cut of up to five per cent and one with up to a 10 per cent cut. Results will be announced in the 2012 budget.

Caron says Health Canada can't speculate on how a potential budget cut may affect its operations.

Farm groups, such as the CFA, the Canadian Horticultural Council, Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association and Pulse Canada have banded together to write to federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz about the importance of the program. They've also told officials at Health Canada that the money for PMRA to review product registrations should come from Health Canada's base budget "because it should have come from there all along," Hunter says. BF