I have had the pleasure of serving as Acting Manager, Crop Protection, of the Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada (FVGC) in 2022, and welcome the return of Caleigh Hallink-Irwin to this role in January 2023. During the past year, I have witnessed the ‘perfect storm’ regarding crop protection issues facing fruit and vegetable growers in Canada. In this article, I outline some of these concerns and comment on what FVGC is doing to address them.

Crop protection concerns

To begin with, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) is mandated under the Pest Control Products Act to re-evaluate crop protection products every 15 years. This process has led to the loss of some of these products, or at least some of their uses, thereby impacting the control of insects, plant diseases and weeds in fruits and vegetables.

For example, the loss of most uses of the multi-site mode of action (MoA) ethylene bis-dithiocarbamate fungicides has left growers with alternative single-site MoA products that may be less efficacious and more prone to the development of pest resistance. Furthermore, some of those products that remain registered have had use restrictions added to their labels such as longer, agronomically unfeasible pre-harvest intervals (PHIs) or restricted entry intervals (REIs).

Where we are seeing resistance to crop protection products in the management of horticultural crop pests, some products with new MoAs are being developed but they are scarcely keeping up with current and anticipated future needs.

New species of invasive pests arrive in Canada with unfortunate regularity, necessitating urgent research on their control, and rejigging of integrated pest management (IPM) strategies developed for other pests on the same crops. Recent examples of invasive pests that come to mind include the spotted wing drosophila and the brown marmorated stink bug.

Of further concern, some jurisdictions, such as the European Union (EU), are reducing the acceptable maximum residue limits (MRLs) for a succession of crop protection products making it ever more challenging to export Canadian crops to the EU.

Finally, funding for the Pest Management Centre (PMC) of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) has been frozen for at least the last 10 years. PMC conducts research on newer and safer crop protection solutions for pests of low acreage, i.e., ‘minor’ crops that would otherwise be left without control options. This funding freeze means that PMC’s former target of 40 new minor use research projects per year will be reduced by nearly half in 2023.

What is being done by FVGC to address these concerns

To help make PMRA’s health and environmental risk assessments of crop protection products more realistic, so that more products and uses survive the re-evaluation process, the fruit and vegetable industry needs to assist PMRA in collecting information on crop production methods and the use of these products. Without this information, PMRA must make the most conservative, i.e., worst-case assumptions regarding use patterns for crop protection products in performing their risk assessments (e.g., assumptions of 100% crop treated, maximum rate of application, maximum number of applications). This means it is critical for growers to participate in surveys that provide PMRA with real-world use data. FVGC continues to run such surveys in response to requests from PMRA and to lobby the federal government to extend the three years of additional operational funding that PMRA was granted until 2024 in aid of their continuing to be able to collect and effectively use this information.

We note that PMRA has asked for “glove studies” to be conducted on a half dozen horticultural crops in aid of quantifying protection factors for farm workers when wearing gloves during various activities in the field. These protection factors should shorten REIs to be more agronomically feasible and aid retention of crop protection products that could otherwise be lost to conservative worker exposure assessments. FVGC is advocating for completion of the protocol for this research and is lobbying government and industry for the funds to do the actual research work.

Each time that the EU proposes reductions in MRLs for products used on fruits and vegetables grown in Canada, FVGC is informed of these proposals via the Market Access Secretariat (MAS) of AAFC. FVGC responds to these proposals by researching and documenting the potential impact of these proposals on exports by Canada’s fruit and vegetable growers which MAS forwards to the World Trade Organization in an effort to halt the EU’s proposed actions.

Lastly, growers also need to see an increase, not further decreases, in research to address industry-identified minor use priorities. To accomplish this, FVGC and OFVGA are actively lobbying the federal government with aligned messages asking for an immediate $5 million increase in PMC’s budget with annual increases to account for subsequent inflation.

Conclusion

It's abundantly clear that all the above concerns make it increasingly difficult to successfully manage crop pests which is why FVGC continues to work diligently on the crop protection file in aid of Canada’s fruit and vegetable growers.

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Christopher P. Dufault was Acting Manager, Crop Protection, at the Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada in 2022. He previously headed the Re-evaluation and Use Analysis Section at Pest Management Regulatory Agency until his retirement from the federal government in 2012 and was editor of The Grower in 1980-81. He has been an Ottawa-based consultant since 2013