0
Home
News
Directory
E-newsletter
Magazine
Events
Data
AgReport
Subscribe
US House passes new pesticide registration bill
Mar. 24, 2017
U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Chairman of House Agriculture Committee’s Subcommittee on Biotechnology, Horticulture, and Research, announced his bill to ensure pesticide safety and reliability passed the House with unanimous support. H.R. 1029, the Pesticide Registration Enhancement Act of 2017, reauthorizes the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act of 2003 (PRIA) and makes minor improvements. H.R. 1029 passed unanimously out of the House Agriculture Committee in February.
PRIA provides predictable timelines for over 200 product categories allowing industry to grow and innovate, adding jobs to the U.S. economy and providing additional options for producers.
“It’s not every day in Washington that a bill is backed by both industry and environmental advocates, but this reauthorization of PRIA is,” said Davis. “Reauthorizing PRIA is extremely important for our farmers because it means certainty for an industry full of risk and unpredictability, but it’s also critical to preventing public health issues like bed bugs and the spread of mosquitoes carrying deadly diseases such as West Nile and Zika. Before PRIA, pesticide registration could take anywhere from two to eight years. This bipartisan legislation improves PRIA to ensure transparency, consistency, and efficiency remains within the pesticide registration process.”
H.R. 1029 is supported by a broad coalition of industry and environmental advocates, including CropLife America, National Resources Defense Council, Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment, and more.
“PRIA-4 builds upon the win-win tradition of the first PRIA. It also increases and clarifies categories covered, uses maintenance fees for registration review, protects funds for grants programs, and increases funding. PRIA-4 will continue the positive progress that the original PRIA brought to the pesticide registration process, and Congress should move quickly to reauthorize the highly successful pesticide registration program and provide certainty for the regulated community,” coalition members expressed in a letter in support of H.R. 1029.
The current PRIA legislation expires on September 30, 2017. H.R. 1029 extends the Act with minor improvements. Specific improvements include:
• Reauthorizes existing provisions for seven years, as opposed to the five-year extensions in previous iterations of PRIA.
• Provides two increases of 5 percent each on registration fees over the seven years.
• Provides a $500,000 set aside, from fees paid-for by the industry, for EPA to meet deadlines for efficacy guidelines for pesticides to combat bed bugs (which have shut down schools, hotels, dorms, and movie theaters), and crawling and flying insects, which will inform industry what efficacy tests are required.
• Increases maintenance fees to $31 million annually from 2017 – 2023 and provides increased funding for grant programs, promoting Good Laboratory Practices, and farm worker protection education.
Background on PRIA
The first derivation of this program, known as PRIA, was passed in 2003 to provide predictable timelines in the pesticide registration process and increase transparency between EPA and the registrant community.
The original PRIA legislation updated the process for collecting maintenance fees and required EPA to conduct pesticide reviews in a specific timeframe. It also authorized a new type of fee— registration service fees—to defray costs associated with EPA review of applications for registering new pesticide active ingredients and products, adding new uses to existing pesticide registrations, establishing and amending tolerances, and amending pesticide labels. PRIA established a schedule outlining the fee amounts associated with each specific activity. It also promoted shorter decision review periods for reduced-risk applications.
More from AgroNews
Change
Hot TopicSubscribe
| Subscribe Email: | * | |
| Name: | ||
| Mobile Number: | ||
Comment
0/1200
NEWSLETTER