For Release:  June 15, 2016

EPA has issued a draft Pesticide Registration Notice (PRN) that proposes to clarify and update criteria by which EPA classifies crops as “minor use.”  FIFRA 2(ll)(2) defines a minor use as one that does not provide “sufficient economic incentive.”

In evaluating “sufficient economic incentive,” EPA is proposing to consider the following factors explicitly:

• the difference in time between incurring costs of generating data for registration and obtaining revenue from product sales;
• the multiple years over which revenue is generated; and
• the costs of producing and distributing the product. 

This draft PRN also explains how qualitative information may be used to inform the quantitative analysis and interpret the results. The revised approach can be applied to conventional pesticides, biopesticides, and antimicrobial pesticides to determine whether they meet the definition of minor use.

In some cases, this could broaden the definition of minor use pesticides crops, thus providing more opportunities for incentives to registrants to support their registrations of pesticides for minor uses.  Minor uses can provide insufficient economic incentive for pesticide registrants to keep these pest control tools registered for use on these crops, or to register new ones for these crops.

This approach was developed in consultation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

 The draft PRN can be viewed in docket EPA-HQ-OPP-2015- 0814 at www.regulations.gov.  Comments can be submitted to the docket and will be accepted until August 15, 2016.