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Pesticide News Story: Proposed Crop Grouping Rule Eases Regulatory Burden and Opens Opportunities for Minor Crop Producers
For Release: May 30, 2007
Minor crop producers and consumers will be the primary beneficiaries of a recent EPA proposal to revise its pesticide tolerance crop grouping regulations, which allow the establishment of tolerances for multiple, related crops based upon data from a representative set of crops. The proposed revision, published in a May 23, 2007, Federal Register notice, would create a new crop group for edible fungi (mushrooms), expand existing crop groups by adding new commodities, establish new crop subgroups, and revise the representative crops in some groups. These proposed changes reflect the global competition for new or ethnic commodities. EPA expects these revisions to promote greater use of crop groupings for tolerance-setting purposes and, in particular, to assist in retaining or making available pesticides for minor crop uses. This is the first in a series of regulatory crop group updates.
The current proposal is based upon a petition submitted to EPA by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Inter-regional Research Project No. 4 (IR-4), along with the governments of Canada and Mexico, working with over 180 crop, agrichemical, and regulatory experts representing more than 30 countries. The petition and the monographs supporting it have been included in the docket for the proposed rule, which can be found under docket EPA-HQ-OPP-2006-0766 at www.regulations.gov. This proposal is a burden-reducing regulation. Comments are due on or before July 23, 2007. The Federal Register notice announcing the proposal can be found at https://www.epa.gov/EPA-PEST/2007/May/Day-23/p9595.htm.