During a House Agricultural Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK) asked Chairman of the Council of Producers and Distributors of Agrotechnology Terry Abbott about regulatory hoops that companies face before releasing new agriculture products.
00:00Next time, I will recognize the gentleman from Oklahoma, Mr. Lucas, for five minutes.
00:05Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to our witnesses for testifying here today.
00:09Mr. Abbott, your testimony touches on the importance of producer choice and flexibility for pest management strategies.
00:15Yet the EPA's complex regulatory framework often makes it difficult for producers to access new and innovative crop protection products and post-patent products.
00:25Can you explain the regulatory hoops that a company like yours has to jump through before a product can hit the marketplace?
00:34Thank you, Congressman Lucas.
00:36Yes, so we help our customers develop inert systems for their post-patent chemistries that they're actually.
00:44So we support and do a supporting role.
00:46They ultimately submit, but we do the behind the scenes work with them.
00:52So we try to make sure that they have everything they need from the confidential statement of formula to everything that they can think of.
01:03So what, if anything, can Congress do to clear up the regulatory burden for innovators and bring products to the market faster?
01:12From your observations, what can we do?
01:15Well, I thank you for PREA 5, and that was a great start.
01:18We're working towards it with Lee Zeldin coming on board, and we're starting to push through the backlog, but we've got a long way to go.
01:27I would say we need to be adequately funded.
01:30I know you guys have pushed that forward, but we really need you to work with your colleagues, if at all possible, on the Appropriations Committee to try to get full funding.
01:39Because as of right now, this is the third year in a row, we're 20% light on funding on the OPP.
01:47Mr. Weatherby, your company has modernized the sterile insect fly technique to target a pest that's especially catastrophic to soft fruit crops.
01:56Your testimony touches on the unique challenges your company faces with regulatory uncertainty.
02:02But can you expand on this for a little bit?
02:04And as you're thinking about that, does the current regulatory framework incentivize new technologies?
02:09And if not, what can we do to help ensure that we incentivize innovative technologies like your own?
02:17Yeah, I think the – apologies.
02:20I think that's the tough thing is that the legislation that's there has been there for chemicals.
02:26We're looking at modern breakthroughs that aren't necessarily there based in plants or, in our case, insects or, you know, even biologicals.
02:34You know, part of it is the framework's not set up to handle those well.
02:38The expertise that's available for the EPA and the USDA is very focused on what they used to do, which was a lot of chemical pesticides and insecticides that went through.
02:48Updating, you know, the talent pool there as well as the ability to handle some of these new technologies that fit very close.
02:56So we're – you know, my example would be that agro-gene is being treated as a pesticide.
03:01Even though we're not really a chemical that is being applied to anything, it is a biological material, but it is going down that path.
03:08So giving a little bit of flexibility to the people that are in the EPA and the USDA is really important.
03:15Also, because it doesn't fit clearly into any of those categories, we're actually having to go through both the EPA and the USDA and having – for deregulation.
03:24And part of that is – alignment is important.
03:27So part of it is that one agency can be a little slower than another and would keep us from getting to commercialization, which, you know, with a startup is vital that we get through – you know, we have limited funding.
03:40Part of it is needing to get through some of those regulatory processes in order to show the proof of our technology.
03:47And that's true of a lot of these different companies.
03:49Absolutely.
03:50Mr. Abbott, turning back to you, your testimony mentions that many post-patent products still face the same backlog of approval at the EPA that the new chemistries face.
04:00Can you share with us your perspective on why this continue – is continuing to occur even when these products have been in use for decades in most cases?
04:11Well, where it stands, and as I understand how the system works, they are required to go in through registration as well.
04:18So they don't leapfrog.
04:19They're still put in the line.
04:21And so if there's a backlog already, it's going to continue, right?
04:25That's where we're at.
04:26So until we get adequate staffing on the OPP, I think you're going to continue to see that be an issue, even though it's maybe 40 years of chemistry.
04:36Anytime you make a change, it goes into the EPA for re-registration and re-evaluation.
04:43And thank you for the courtesy, Mr. Chairman.
Be the first to comment