US warns of inert cancellations
Date:04-24-2008
The US EPA has warned pesticide registrants that products containing unsupported inert ingredients will not be eligible for registration after August 9th 2008. The EPA revoked 123 tolerance exemptions for inert ingredients on August 9th 2006 due to insufficient data. The revocation date for 59 exemptions has since been extended to August 9th 2009 because the industry has made commitments to generate the data to support them.
The EPA has not received indications of support for 64 exemptions, the director of the EPA Office of Pesticide Programs’ registration division, Lois Rossi, said at the CropLife America/Informa conference this month. Some of these inerts may no longer be in use, but the Agency is trying to identify pesticides that might contain them, Ms Rossi added.
CropLife America and the Chemical Producers Distributors Association formed the Joint Inerts Task Force (JITF) last year to represent inert ingredient suppliers and registrants. The JITF has provided the EPA with data development schedules and the Agency is reviewing studies that it submitted, Ms Rossi said.
The JITF has a unique structure to enable the protection of confidential business information, explained Karen Swayze of Dow AgroSciences. Groups of similar inerts were organised into clusters and companies interested in supporting them joined cluster support teams. The JITF formed 18 such teams, each supporting up to 100 inerts. The data generated will be owned by the various cluster support teams. The EPA intends to issue an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on inert ingredient data compensation by the end of this year, Ms Rossi said.
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