As you read this, the calendar will have turned over to January and we’ll have begun another year – the first of the 2020s! Looking back on the past decade, crop protection has had some dramatic changes since 2010. We’ve had restrictions placed on most of the old standby materials, seen big growth in the availability and use of biological controls, have far greater awareness of maximum residue limits (MRLs), and begun to develop electronic records of crop protection applications on cell phones. Looking forward to 2030, what would the wish list look like for the next 10 years?

Global registrations

In 2007, a substantial step was taken towards streamlining access to crop protection products globally. The world’s first relatively “global” registration for a new active ingredient was submitted by the former DuPont. The compound chlorantraniliprole, the first diamide insecticide marketed in Canada, was submitted for registration in the United States, Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand simultaneously. Within less than a year and half, the product was registered for use across the majority of three continents. By sharing review work, the registration was completed faster than average compared to independent reviews by these countries. It also established comparable use patterns and MRLs across the globe, balancing the competitive advantage and facilitating trade.

Now a dozen plus years later, global registrations have continued to play a role in several new active ingredients. Unfortunately, however, there are also many where they do not. Selective registrations, however strategic for the registrant, create competitive imbalances and trade challenges resulting from MRL discrepancies. If the majority of new registrations by the end of the next decade were to come from global submissions – indeed a lofty goal –  that would go a long way in alleviating problems associated with unequal product access and within commodity trade.

Global re-evaluations

Despite progress in global registration, there has yet to be any real movement on a global re-evaluation strategy. For example, the United States, European Union, and Canada are completely out of sync when it comes down to dealing with reviewing products that are already on the market. This is beginning to cause as much, if not more disruption to agriculture competitiveness and trade markets than the initial registration issue. Interestingly, as the re-evaluation reviews in the United States and Canada operate on 15-year cycles, that first global registration of chlorantraniliprole will soon be up for re-evaluation review. The original analysis that led to its registration was an aligned and coordinated effort between multiple countries. Will that simply be abandoned, and will everyone go their separate ways now just because it has entered the re-evaluation phase?

There is some potential improvement on this front, well at least some discussion, as the recent North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Trilateral Working Group on Pesticides raised this issue with regulators from the three countries in September 2019. In their newest workplan, the NAFTA partners, notably the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have indicated a desire to identify opportunities for shared review work in the context of re-evaluation reviews.

The level of cooperation required to bring this equal with the global registration process is a long way off. However, if at least Canada and the United States could make some progress on aligning the scheduling of re-evaluation reviews and collaborate on major science policy, that would be a big step forward in the next decade. 

New technology

The pace of new introductions of traditional conventional or even biological crop protection materials continues to slow. In PMRA’s annual reports, the number of new active ingredients of either conventional or biological origin registered each year is reported. The agency registered 14 new active ingredients in 2014-2015, 18 in 2015-2016, 10 in 2016-2017, and just seven in 2017-2018. This is all despite research and development budgets at major crop protection companies being as high as they’ve ever been. New highly effective compounds that meet the increasingly stringent human health and environmental safety requirements of global governments are getting harder to discover.

Fortunately, we will see many commercial introductions of new crop protection technologies in the coming decade. Ribonucleic acid interference (RNAi) has huge potential for providing alternative crop protection solutions across the board (see The Grower for January 2019). On the plant genetics side, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) offers genome editing technology with simplicity and accuracy that was only dreamed of a short time ago to enhance crop resilience. Producers must be willing to adopt and try alternate approaches for crop protection. The status quo is becoming less and less an option.

Public trust

Consumers are asking more questions than ever before about how food is being produced. The public trust of the consumer has influence on policy that will affect how producers can do their jobs. It is up to us as producers and farm organizations to communicate the message to the public about why and how we go about crop protection. There is absolutely nothing to hide. Canada has a world-class regulatory system to stand behind. Just like actual crop protection, when it comes to public trust, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Communication alone may be the most important innovation in the coming decade.