Market research for investigating opportunities for more vegetable meal occasions
14 April 2016Sweetpotato Chlorotic Stunt Virus (SPCSV)
7 July 2016In Australia, before an agrochemical product can be sold or used, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) must register it. This only occurs following a review of a comprehensive package of data that includes efficacy, crop safety and residue data. The manufacturer of the product must supply this information to the APVMA before this process can begin. The cost of generating and collating such data packages is high, often costing many hundreds-of-thousands of dollars. These costs must be recouped by the manufacturer through sales of their product. However, only small areas of many horticultural crops are grown and manufacturers consider it too difficult or impossible to recoup their registration costs. Thus, manufacturers will rarely spend resources on generating the data or preparing the associated applications. As a result, horticulturalists are often placed in situations where they risk severe crop losses from insects, weeds and diseases because the agrochemical tools needed to protect their crops from these pests are not registered for their situation. On the other hand, they could spray their crops with pesticides that are not registered and risk buyers rejecting their produce and potentially-face severe penalties for pesticide miss-use.