REGULATORY AGENDA AND SUSTAINABILITY
CropLife Latin America and the network of Associations maintain a proactive dialogue with regulatory authorities, farmers, academia and other sectors to promote and defend regulations based on scientific evidence that allow access to agricultural technologies. Essential topics to advance towards agricultural sustainability.
This interactive map shows the most important advances and challenges of the 2021 operation which will remain on the agenda in 2022.
CropLife Latin America maintained the global leadership in raising the voice of the region on the negative impact for agricultural exports due to the loss of the Maximum Residue Limits of key molecules for agricultural production.
Together with the National Associations, we maintain dialogue with the accredited diplomatic missions of the World Trade Organization, the authorities and the agricultural sectors. The most active countries were Guatemala, Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador and Colombia.
These have been the axes of joint work between authorities from different countries such as Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico and Chile due to initiatives that tried to prohibit or restrict products invoking the Precautionary Principle without considering the risk assessment.
LEGAL CERTAINTY
In 2022, the agreement was filed by Costa Rica and approved by the Congresses of Colombia and Chile. We monitor its implementation.
CropLife Latin America shares the vision of the Industry at the meetings of the Latin America and the Caribbean Group, GRULAC, and the FAO/WHO Coordinating Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean, CCLAC. These groups address issues related to regional conventions such as Rotterdam or CODEX.
In the last two years, a series of judicial actions of constitutional rank have been detected, such as the tutelage action or the group action, which seek the protection of rights to health or the environment due to the alleged improper use of certain chemical pesticides of agricultural use. The situation in Colombia is particularly worrying, where the Constitutional Court opened the possibility of prohibiting the use of crop protection products, based on protection actions when there are other judicial or administrative means to achieve this task.
CropLife Latin America together with the General Secretariat of the Andean Community of Nations CAN, the national authorities of Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia have held various workshops to achieve the proper implementation of Andean Decision 804 and Technical Manual 2075, especially regarding the adoption of GHS or globally harmonized labeling.
CropLife Latin America, Procultivos and CultiVida, with the technical support of the Waterborne firm, concluded the Environmental Risk Assessment – Second Phase project, through which tools were developed for the stepwise evaluation of the environmental exposure of pesticides in water in key crops from Colombia and Peru.
After 4 years of intense work and dialogue with the regulatory authorities of Ecuador, AgroCalidad issued resolution 0018 of 2022 through which the methodology is adopted to determine the re-entry interval to the treated area (REI) by risk assessment for chemical agricultural pesticides.
The National Pesticides Technical Committee, a body where Ecuador's regulatory entities are represented, approved the inclusion on the label of the information related to the Mode of Action, bearing in mind the current GHS implementation process. This decision is very important because, among other effects, it will allow adequate agronomic management for the use of chemical pesticides for agricultural use and avoid resistance to pests and/or diseases in crops.
El Salvador joined the Guatemala-Honduras-El Salvador biotechnology agreement through Ministerial Resolution 105-2022.
In Costa Rica, various moratorium bills are being monitored.
Resolution 165-2022 of the Ministry of Health of Panama, which established trade restrictions on biotechnological foods, was repealed.
The first edited commercial product in the region was analyzed and resolved favorably in Honduras.
Maintaining the dialogue with the authorities to achieve harmonization of the labels above national interpretations and accelerating the design approval process continue to be the main challenges for 2023. This labeling standard was approved within the framework of the Central America Customs Union, in 2021. USDA and IICA are now supporting the governments to try to make the harmonization effective.
The new regulations for the registration of pesticides were analyzed and discussed in 2022, and entered into force in February 2023. The new regulation included the registration by homologation that will facilitate the arrival on the market of products available in other OECD countries.
In Panama, the authorities' proposal to prohibit products classified as Ia and Ib was contained. The government and industry are in talks to define risk mitigation mechanisms.
