Legislation introduced by U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL) to ensure the safety and reliability of pesticides cleared the House on Monday with unanimous support.
The Pesticide Registration Enhancement Act, H.R. 1029, would reauthorize the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act of 2003 (PRIA), which outlined a timetable for more than 200 product categories to support innovation and biotechnology industry growth.
Davis, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee’s Subcommittee on Biotechnology, Horticulture and Research, said, “It’s not every day in Washington that a bill is backed by both industry and environmental advocates, but this reauthorization of PRIA is.”
“Reauthorizing PRIA is extremely important for our farmers because it means certainty for an industry full of risk and unpredictability, but it’s also critical to preventing public health issues like bed bugs and the spread of mosquitoes carrying deadly diseases such as West Nile and Zika,” Davis said.
Before PRIA, pesticide registration could take anywhere from two to eight years. The original PRIA legislation updated the process for collecting maintenance fees and required the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct pesticide reviews in a specific timeframe.
“This bipartisan legislation improves PRIA to ensure transparency, consistency, and efficiency remains within the pesticide registration process,” Davis said.
Davis’ bill would reauthorize PRIA for seven years, establish two increases of 5 percent on registration fees over that time, set aside $500,000 in industry fees for development of pesticides to combat bed bugs, and increase maintenance fees to $31 million annually through 2023.
A coalition of industry and environmental advocates that included CropLife America, Natural Resources Defense Council and Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment wrote in a letter of support that the reauthorization builds on the “win-win tradition” of the first PRIA.
“It also increases and clarifies categories covered, uses maintenance fees for registration review, protects funds for grant programs and increases funding,” coalition members wrote.
The legislative proposal for reauthorization would continue the positive progress that the original PRIA brought to the pesticide registration process, “and Congress should move quickly to reauthorize the highly successful pesticide registration program and provide certainty for the regulated community,” the letter said.