Brazil's Ibama Abandons Criteria Created in the US to Evaluate Risks of Agrochemicals‏
Date:02-20-2015
The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) announced that it has altered its criteria for the Environmental Risk Assessment. Until now, Brazil had used so far a methodology created by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The change results from a set of questions of experts, according to official sources. These experts say that the American criteria "does not take into account the Brazilian conditions. That methodology was defined according to the edapho-climatic conditions of the United States and, thus, uses scenarios determined for that country", the official announcement reads.
The Supervisor of Technical Analysis at Brazil's Embrapa, Rafael Mingoti, sustains that "by adopting [the methodology of the United States], we assume a grade a uncertainty, as we can register an agrochemicals without considering the reality of Brazilian scenarios".
In order to replace North American norms, Embrapa develops local criteria through a project called "Identification of National Scenarios for the Assessment of agrochemicals Environmental Risk". The initiative has as a main goal to compared "worst case" scenarios, which is adopted by Ibama on surface body water with more representative cases on predominant soybean crops in Brazil.
A data cross-check will take place as well taking the software tools of the Geographic Information System in a perspective to identify in soybean areas the territorial distribution of types of soils, relief and hydrography.
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