Forecasting and planning for challenge and change ahead were highlighted as major industry themes at last week’s Crop Protection in Southern Britain conference organised by the Association of Applied Biologists.
The conference attracted more than 90 delegates and was also supported by the British Crop Production Council, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany and The Arable Group.
In total 43 papers were presented at the event covering themes such as new legislation on pesticide use. Grant Stark, Chemicals Regulation Directorate (CRD) chaired the session on the new legislation and set the scene by outlining the legislation that underpins the Thematic Strategy for Pesticides.
The new Pesticide Authorisation Regulation comes into force in June 2011 and is due to bring with it significant changes in the principles that underpin the regulations, in particular assessment changing from risk based to hazard based, with comparative assessment and substitution of “less safe” products. The impact will largely start to be felt as products come up for review in 2015-16 onwards.
“The directive on the Sustainable Use of pesticides is the first substantive piece of EU legislation governing the use of pesticides and comes into force in a number of stages from 2011 to 2020,” explained Stark. “The key objective is to raise standards across the EU member states. One of the features of this will be the need for each member state to develop National Action Plans to reduce the risk from pesticides and promote the use of low input systems.”
“Most of the measures which form part of the National Action Plans already feature as part of existing very effective UK statutory and voluntary controls. Our policy is to introduce any new legislation or regulatory processes only where absolutely essential. However there are a few areas where changes to the UK approach will need to be made to ensure that they are consistent with the requirements of the directive.” These changes
include the establishment of a system of training and certification programmes to be in place by 2013, the introduction of a certificate of competence to sell pesticide products from 2015, the requirement for application equipment to be tested more frequently from 2020.
“A lot of the measures outlined in the Directive are already taken by UK farmers and growers. However, some member states will want to see a more regulatory approach being taken, but the UK
Government will want to engage with the industry to have a cooperative approach to further minimise risks associated with pesticide use,” said Stark.
Concluding the session James Clarke, ADAS Boxworth looked at the impact of changing pesticide availability. “The loss of pesticides, due to the failure to meet water quality legislation, is likely to have a huge impact on crop yields and therefore profitability of UK farming,” he warned. “The potential loss of herbicides due to changing approvals legislation is also likely to have a significant impact in terms of increased yield losses. The consequence of this could be large increases in costs, reduced gross margins of 40 per cent or reductions in yields such that the production of a specific crop may no longer be viable.”
