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Regulatory Coordination and Harmonization
Highlights
OECD Pesticide Working Group
NAFTA Technical Working Group on Pesticides
EPA is active in a number of scientific harmonization and regulatory coordination efforts through international and regional organizations, and directly with other countries, in order to develop common or compatible international approaches to pesticide review, registration and standards-setting. EPA believes that making pesticide regulatory programs more consistent internationally will:
a) maintain high standards for the protection of human health and the environmentOECD Pesticide Working Group
b) promote benefits from shared scientific and technical expertise
c) lessen the resource burden on governments and the regulatory community, and
d) minimize trade problems.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is an intergovernmental organization consisting of 30 industrialized countries in Europe, North America, Asia and the Pacific. Through its Environment Program, OECD works to help countries manage the risks of chemicals as efficiently and effectively as possible.
In 1994, OECD established the Pesticide Forum, now known as the Working
Group on Pesticides, to help countries cope with the increasingly burdensome
workload of conducting new risk assessments for hundreds of pesticides
that have been on the market for years, and assessments for new active
ingredient pesticides. It is the first forum for national pesticide regulators
from developed countries to discuss common issues. The OECD Working Group
on Pesticides includes activities on conventional, biological, and antimicrobial
pesticides.
EPA is involved in cooperative work to harmonize pesticide data requirements,
focus test guidelines on pesticide regulatory needs, and harmonize industry
data submissions and governments data review formats and content. OECD
encourages the exchange of review reports and has developed an electronic
database to facilitate such exchanges and collaboration on reviews. EPA
is working with OECD countries on electronic data submission (EDS) for
industry. Read more about electronic data submissions.
To access more information on OECD's Environmental Health and Safety programs,
refer to the OECD
home page. 
NAFTA Technical Working Group on Pesticides
U.S./Canada bilateral efforts on pesticides regulatory harmonization started in the early 1990s. They were expanded in 1996 to include Mexico through the North American Free Trade Agreement's (NAFTA) Technical Working Group (TWG) on Pesticides. The goal of the TWG is to develop a coordinated pesticides regulatory framework among NAFTA partners that will allow for the creation of a North American market for pesticides and make work sharing the way of doing business in the continent. This will also minimize impediments to pesticide registration on a North American scale. Through this trilateral work, communication among the countries has become routine. When making regulatory decisions, the agencies consider repercussions on a NAFTA level. Thus, the NAFTA work has become embedded in the agencies' internal regulatory processes. Furthermore, the success of the NAFTA work is dependent on the creation of partnerships with industry, growers and public interest groups. Through these partnerships, the work of the TWG has, among other things, addressed specific trade irritants among countries, built harmonized trilateral regulatory and scientific capacity, and encouraged registrants to coordinate data submissions in the three NAFTA countries to facilitate joint reviews.
The successes of the working group are detailed in a The
North American Initiative Milestone Report (PDF) (1.45MB about PDF). For more
information, refer to OPP's NAFTA
TWG home page. Information on NAFTA activities and Canada's
Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), may be accessed at PMRA's
web page.