The American Soybean Association (ASA) and other ag groups recently sent a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requesting a separate comment period on a new practice of evaluating various pesticide products.

The new aspects include EPA’s recent Blanket FQPA Determination on organophosphate pesticides (OP) in the Agency’s Chlorpyrifos-Methyl: Human Health Draft Risk Assessment (DRA) for Registration Review.

The new FQPA 10X standard is a major shift from the EPA’s own policy of reviewing pesticides and crop protection products. ASA and other groups expressed concerns about EPA not sharing the approach with growers before implementation, and said the practice would result in a great burden on registering pesticides, create high standard for farmers to meet, casts doubt on crop protection products and will threaten the availability of proven valuable pest control tools to growers.

“We believe this additional burden is unnecessary, unreasonable, and unwarranted – especially when there has been no opportunity to comment on what constitutes a major underlying policy change,” the groups state in the letter. “Not only would the Blanket FQPA Determination for OP pesticides constitute a dramatic shift in policy, we are concerned that this will have harmful effects on the continued registration of these pesticides.”

Click here to read the letter.