With the federal government embarking on an ambitious savings program, public spending will increasingly be under the microscope. One program that certainly deserves scrutiny is the federal minor use program. Not for careless spending, rather the opposite. 

Government is not investing enough – and the business case for it couldn’t be stronger.

For field crops, the responsibility for bringing new crop protection technology to market is borne by the manufacturers who will be selling the final products. Manufacturers can recover the development and regulatory costs by product sales. However, for most edible horticulture crops, manufacturers find the sales potential is not sufficient to justify costs required to develop and register uses on these crops in Canada due to low crop acreages. This is referred to as the “minor use problem”; it is the agricultural equivalent of an orphan drug in human medicine.

The need for public assistance to help support minor use crop protection was first recognized in the United States which developed the IR-4 project in 1963. As Canada faced similar, if not worse, challenges with our minor use registrations due to our comparably smaller horticulture industry, we were falling behind our U.S. counterparts. Finally, in 2003, a group of growers succeeded in convincing the federal government to support a minor use program. 

The minor use program assists growers with access to crop protection technology for smaller acreage crops where manufacturers are reluctant to obtain registration themselves. The responsibility of undertaking the necessary scientific research is conducted by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s (AAFC) Pest Management Centre (PMC) and the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) completes the required regulatory reviews. This joint initiative has been ongoing ever since.

Despite its tremendous success and critical importance to food security and affordability, the current program is facing major headwinds. The program’s budget has been frozen for more than a decade and consequently its output has declined drastically. Annual project levels are now approximately half of what they were under the Growing Forward framework period in 2008-2013. 

Yet the need for new crop protection tools keeps growing. The accelerating rate of removal of older crop protection products from the market and the emergence of new pests has led to great demand for new tools. The urgency for new products is emphasized by the current unprecedented demand for the emergency use registration program – a program that was designed to address crisis pest outbreaks when existing tools are insufficient. Not only does this reduce the ability for Canada to produce fresh, nutritious, and affordable food, it is terrible economic policy. Let’s let the numbers speak for themselves. 

In 2016, AAFC completed a study of the economic impact of the minor use program in Canada from 2003-2013. The study looked at potential crop losses that were likely to have been avoided by the availability of crop protection tools provided through minor use. It also compared the value of the benefits to society from government investment in the program and estimated impact to Canada’s GDP from minor use activities. Though it is now dated, the results were staggering.

During the period of the study, access to crop protection tools through the minor use program was estimated to contribute to the prevention of $653 million to $998 million in crop losses annually – or approximately $9 billion in total. Following the same methodology as the original study, in 2024 alone, crop losses of $1.65 billion may be attributed to pest management achieved via minor use! 

Looking further into economic analysis, the 2016 study also compared the level of government investment to the expected benefits and concluded that for every $1 of government cost into the program, $42 of benefit are accrued to society. Finally, using multipliers available from Statistics Canada related to economic impacts and employment, the minor use program contributed to the additional annual employment of more than 12,000 persons annually. 

It is hard to imagine a more impactful program of similar magnitude within government. While the direct economic impact from the lost capacity of the minor use program over the last decade is not easily obtained, based on the reality that the program output has been reduced by approximately half, it can be concluded that the economic impact to Canada’s farmers from lack of potential pest control is in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars annually. It is a huge opportunity that is being lost. 

The recent AAFC’s audit of the minor use program reiterates the critical role this program serves and recent calls for resourcing have come forward from the FPT Working Group on Pesticides Management and the House of Common’s Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.

Fortunately, we are not talking about huge investment on government scales to turn the ship around. Based on inflationary changes over the last decade, an annual additional investment of approximately $7 million would return the level of program funding to comparable under that of the Growing Forward program. Even at this level of enhanced funding, the PMC’s minor use program would still account for less than one percent of AAFC’s annual departmental budget.

I challenge government to find a better return on investment.