The ‘Emergency Authorisation’ process on pesticides is often misunderstood. Inherited from the EU, it was designed to allow regulators to adopt the precautionary principle but to have the option of allowing controlled and judicious use only when essential. It was always hard to articulate, but the process was an integral part of the precautionary principle, not a departure from it.
The recent decision not to grant an ‘emergency authorisation’ on the use of thiamethoxam in sugar beet coupled with signals that the government intends to remove emergency authorisations altogether, makes it essential that Ministers commit to modernising the current regulation of biopesticides. Without change, there will be chronic loss of plant protection options with major impacts on UK food production.
Biopesticides fall into three main categories. Firstly, there are those use biochemical pheromones to deter certain insect pests or to disrupt their reproductive cycle or lure them to traps. Secondly there are beneficial bacteria and fungi or natural biochemicals that either boost the natural defences of a plant against fungal diseases or directly create defences for the plant. Finally, there are Plant Incorporated Protectants where precision breeding techniques can be used to breed traits into a plant to synthesise natural resistance to certain pests and diseases.
Currently, UK policy on microbials and pheromones is governed by legacy EU laws which make little sense. Biopesticides are regulated as active ingredients in very much the same way as synthetic chemical pesticides even though they often use compounds that are well understood and often abundant in the natural environment and human food chain. In most cases the environment has evolved over millions of years to accommodate them.
But, as soon as a biological product makes a plant protection claim, it is forced through the same regulatory regime as synthetic chemicals. In reality, the boundaries between good nutrition, a healthy soil biome and plant health overlap with crop protection objectives. There are no hard boundaries in our environment. It is ridiculous to regulate biopesticides in the same way as synthetic chemical products where new compounds with unknown long-term impacts are released into the environment.
In health, it has long been established that traditional herbal medicines should be regulated very differently to pharmaceutical drugs because they are naturally occurring compounds that have often been used for decades in traditional medicine for some conditions. There is a proportionate registration scheme for such products.
Through the Genetic Technology Act, Defra established a registration scheme for precision bred organisms which replaced outdated EU processes and is probably the closest template to adopt for a reformed approach to biopesticide regulation.
How would a modernised system work? A company seeking to bring a biopesticide product to market would submit an application to the Health and Safety Executive for a marketing authorisation under a new Biopesticide Marketing Authorisation scheme.
If the product was derived from naturally occurring compounds they would be judged eligible for the registration scheme. The process could be supported by the establishment of a “green list” of commonly used natural compounds in agriculture.
Following eligibility for the scheme, both the FSA and the Advisory Committee of Releases to the Environment (ACRE) could carry out risk assessments on health and the environment respectively. They could be asked to triage products into a light touch ‘tier 1’ assessment or a more detailed ‘tier 2’ assessment just as happens now with precision breeding techniques such as gene editing.
The National Action Plan on pesticides is long overdue but was always an opportunity to reset the approach on pesticides. The current approach is out of date, at odds with the approach taken in other jurisdictions such as Canada and the United States and inconsistent with the modern UK approach for natural genetic resistance achieved using precision breeding techniques. It is time for change.
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