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Can Global Bureaucrats Think Outside The Box When It Comes To Regulating Biopesticides?

Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers

Retailers have reacted to consumer fears about pesticide traces in the food they sell to push for more stringent regulation.

The result of this pressure has been a reduction in the range of old-fashioned chemical pesticides on the market.

You would think that was good news for our health and food safet, and in many ways it is.

It can, however, be a headache for farmers and other growers in some parts of the world, wanting to switch to newere, more low-chem pruducts and to integrated pest control systems.

The problem is the time and cost of getting the various low-chem bio-pesticides and more natural yield enhancement products in development through the licensing process.

There is a limit to the quantities that can be sold because the new products waiting to come onto the market are more focused on specific location and pests.

According to Dr Justin Greaves (Warwick University, Nov 2007): “…the market size is too small to provide economies of scale and encourage firms to enter. Given that bio-pesticides are niche products with very specific applications, the market size for any one product is small.”

Moreover, he adds: “Bureaucrats and regulators are naturally risk averse. Their desire to avoid things going wrong means they are not natural innovators. In other words, being risk averse does not create an encouraging environment for regulatory innovation.”

Prof Wyn Grant, also of Warwick University, UK, warned in 2007: Biopesticide are much more sustainable long term and much safer for humans.

“However, our current regulatory system is set up for synthetic pesticides – it costs up to €2.5m per product. Because biopesticides are so targeted this is a particular problem – it means their market is much smaller than the old-style kill-everything pesticides.”

That’s further complicated by the lack of a universally recognised regulation and licensing system.

It seems, too, that costs and timescales from development through licensing to a product on the market have increased dramatically over the last decade or so.

UK consultancy company Phillips McDougall recently found that the average cost of discovering, developing and registering a new crop protection product rose by 39% to $256 million between 2000 and 2005-08.

That followed the 21% increase to $184 million between 1995 and 2000 found in an earlier study. Development costs rose by 85% to $146 million between 2000 and 2005-08, and had more than doubled from 1995.

The greatest increase was seen in the cost of field trials, which doubled between 2000 and 2005-08 to $54 million. The study attributed the increase to regulatory bodies’ demand for more efficacy data as they direct development products at an increasing number of crops and targets.

Between 2000 and 2005-08 registration costs also more than doubled with the study pinpointing internal company costs as the major reason for the increase, potentially because of the cost of putting dossiers together and of the personnel require to do this.

Finally, the average time for bringing a new product to market rose from 9.1 years in 2000 to 9.8 years in 2005-08.

It’s something that exercises Marcus Meadows-Smith, CEO of a leading US-based company specialising in researching low-chem agricultural products, who contrasts reduced regulatory requirements and review times in the US with the significantly longer and “considerably more onerous” EU process, which makes no distinction between bio- and conventional pesticides.

All of which is pretty alarming for consumers, retailers and farmers – waiting a decade for more environmentally-friendly bio-pesticides and other low-chem agricultural products when we’re constantly being urged to do our bit towards helping restore an environment under extreme threat.

What are the odds of persuading bureaucrats who are generally risk averse to innovate and come up with a universally recognised regulation and licensing system to speed things up a bit – preferably one which supports sustainability and avoids imposing costs on future generations?