At the Eye on Potatoes podcast studio set up on the trade show floor of Potato Expo 2020 in Las Vegas, our host Lane Nordlund and I were pleased to be joined by Rachel Lattimore, senior vice president and general counsel of CropLife America, and Matt Lantz, the potato industry’s go-to trade expert at Bryant Christie, for a great conversation on some of the regulatory impediments to free trade.
While tariffs are popularly viewed as the largest restraint on exports, we in agriculture know that regulations involving pest and disease issues or the application of crop protection tools can create some of the most onerous roadblocks.
That’s why we recorded Eye On Potatoes Episode 5: “Registrations and Their Impacts on U.S. Potato Exports”: to take a deep dive on the challenging topic of disharmonized international maximum residue levels (MRLs) for pesticides. The podcast episode looks at how foreign countries’ differing standards are affecting potato trade and can hinder growers’ choices when seeking to grow healthy crops.
A conversation on crop protection tools can’t be complete without the input of CropLife America. They are the leading experts in Washington, D.C., in helping the growing community both domestically and internationally with important crop protection and pesticide issues. CropLife advocates for policies and regulations to allow U.S. farmers to have the tools they need to grow and market their crops.
Despite what the public is being told by anti-pesticide advocates, growers need access to crop protection tools in order to grow a healthy crop. And when growers follow the label, the residues will be under the MRL—a standard that ensures the product was applied correctly.
On the podcast, Lantz recalls that when he started his career 20 years ago, MRLs were not an issue in trade. “What has happened as the world has developed [is that] countries are overhauling their food safety regulations,” he says. “As part of that, they say we can no longer just simply defer to an exporting country MRL list or the international CODEX list. They say we need to have our own list.”
As a result, unfortunately for growers, today many nations have their own unique MRL lists, with their own rules, standards and regulations. How is that a problem for growers? If a registrant doesn’t have its standards and MRLs approved by that importing country, a grower can properly apply a crop protection tool according to the EPA label, ship that product abroad, and—if the registrant doesn’t have a standard in place—that product can be kicked back at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While MRLs might not be an intentional trade barrier, Lattimore argues that country-specific MRL standards are effectively becoming trade obstacles and that we need to ensure countries are making science-based MRL decisions.
The NPC and our partners in the U.S. potato industry have been working together to address these challenges by getting scientifically sound MRL agreements in place so growers have the products they need to grow healthy crops and feed the world.
For more insight into the impact of MRLs on the potato industry, subscribe to the NPC’s new Eye on Potatoes podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.