The Impact of ESA on Crop Protection Registrations
October 23, 2024 Every other year, crop protection/seed giant Syngenta invites members of the ag press to attend its Media Summit. At this event, the company details all the products innovations in development for the company and talks about key topics impacting the agricultural marketplace, both positive and negative.
At this year’s Media Summit, these two aspects collided, in a manner of speaking. Syngenta representatives told attendees about two new product innovations coming from the company – Tymirium seed care for soybeans and Plinazolin insecticide (featuring the new active ingredient isocycloseram). However, neither of these products have received final registrations at the federal level for market use yet, despite “being in the pipeline” for many years now.
Furthermore, according to Vern Hawkins, Regional Director, North America President, every crop protection company in the country is probably experiencing the same severe slowdown in new product registrations.
Vern Hawkins addresses attendees at the Syngenta Media Summit.
“We invest a lot in research and development for new products,” said Hawkins. “And we are not the only ones experiencing this. You can bet every other company investing in research and development is experiencing it, too.”
The problems are two-fold, he said. First off, the agency charged with product registrations, EPA, is underfunded and undermanned. As originally conceived, the funding mechanisms for EPA under PRIA had crop protection companies paying 30% of the costs to operate this program with Congress appropriating the remaining 70%. However, instead of providing the $166 million in funding it was supposed to for the agency, Congress has only appropriated $134 million.
In terms of personnel, EPA used to have 900 employees working on registrations. But because of retirements and cutbacks, the number of people working on product registrations at EPA will fall to 453 by 2026.
Then there’s the changes in product registrations being spurred by the expanded terms of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). According to Hawkins, this has put better than 1,200 active ingredients up for re-review.
“When you look at what’s going on in EPA right now – and the backdrop of ESA and its legal influence – the agency is spending much of its time defending its decisions in court before doing any work on registering new products,” he said. “And the people doing these court battles are the same ones that do the risk assessments on registering new products. That’s a problem.”
Loading ...Overall, said Hawkins, this has created a system of “do more with less,” but not in a positive way. “Now what we have is an industry that is paying more for less results,” he said. “The degree of difficulty to register a new product with a new active ingredient is higher because the standards have been elevated. None of this paints a pretty picture for our industry.”
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