European Union Directive 91/414, the US Food Quality Protection Act, and Japan's Food Sanitation Law have all placed more strict regulatory requirements for maintaining registrations of existing agrochemicals and new standards on the registration of new products. These regulations, along with others, have placed severe restrictions on the availability of pest control products for minor uses on specialty, low acreage/high value crops in many countries. In the USA, the US Department of Agriculture, theland-grant university system and crop protection industry provide resources for the IR-4 Project to assist in the data development to support registration of chemical and biological crop protection products for specialty crops. Agriculture and Agri-FoodCanada has recently started a program. Pest Management Centre (PMC), which is similar to IR-4 in structure and function. IR-4 works with the PMC to develop data to support NAFTA registrations. The key to IR-4's success has been a high degree of co-operation between IR-4 and the regulatory agencies, US Environmental Protection Agency, California's Department of Pesticide Regulation and Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency. The IR-4 model will be discussed and possible global solutions suchas data sharing, crop grouping, representative crops, geographic zones for residue studies and standardizing of MRL's will be proposed.
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