With the federal government embarking on an ambitious savings program, public spending will increasingly be under the microscope. One program that certainly deserves scrutiny is the federal minor use program. Not for careless spending, rather the opposite.
Government is not investing enough – and the business case for it couldn’t be stronger.
For field crops, the responsibility for bringing new crop protection technology to market is borne by the manufacturers who will be selling the final products. Manufacturers can recover the development and regulatory costs by product sales. However, for most edible horticulture crops, manufacturers find the sales potential is not sufficient to justify costs required to develop and register uses on these crops in Canada due to low crop acreages. This is referred to as the “minor use problem”; it is the agricultural equivalent of an orphan drug in human medicine.
The need for public assistance to help support minor use crop protection was first recognized in the United States which developed the IR-4 project in 1963. As Canada faced similar, if not worse, challenges with our minor use registrations due to our comparably smaller horticulture industry, we were falling behind our U.S. counterparts. Finally, in 2003, a group of growers succeeded in convincing the federal government to support a minor use program.
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