Industry Insights: Exploring the Regulatory Environment for Crop Inputs in Latin America
27 July 2022 
Editor’s note: AgriBusiness Global’s Industry Insights series continues with a look at the key issues manufacturers and distributors face when looking to register new products in Latin America.
Dr. Ana Bejarano is trained as a microbiologist and has worked with biological products and plant growth promoting bacteria during her career. Based in Spain, Bejarano works for knoell where she offers regulatory support mainly for fertilizing products, biostimulants, and biocontrol agents. AgriBusiness Global interviewed Bejarano about the myriad approaches to regulating crop inputs in Latin America.
ABG: What role can or should manufacturers and distributors play in helping shape regulatory policy?
AB: Manufacturers and distributors must coordinate and monitor the implementation of the regulations, standards for mutual support, and the sharing of good practices with the authorities and policy makers.
Manufacturers and distributors must also keep in close contact with the authorities, so that the authorities can understand the needs of the manufacturers and the manufacturers can understand regulatory needs; and request (if needed) specific regulations for each type of product.
We encourage manufacturers and distributors to actively participate on public commenting of draft regulations and keep in touch with the authorities to participate in public enquires to work all together towards the same goal of making agriculture safe.
ABG: If you had the power, what would you change about the regulatory process?
AB: I would move forward the harmonization of regulations process across different countries, recognize the mutual acceptance of residue data across the different countries, and allow the simultaneous registration of products in several countries. It would be also relevant to establish a technical working group that could (strive) toward the same challenges. All this would simplify the registration process and, definitely, improve technical knowledge to generate, analyze, and integrate residue data, which is often generated and analyzed by other countries.
I would also create separate legislations for biological products, not only in Latin America, but worldwide.
ABG: Can you point to any outdated or misguided regulations that, in your opinion, should be changed?
AB: Probably environmental risk guidelines. Latin America region has very different landscapes, climates and soil types. However, there are no available datasets where environmental input parameters could be retrieved from and inserted into modeling tools.
This may push users to adopt or adapt inaccurate data-from other regions and climate conditions, which may lead to misleading results.
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