The Northwest Horticultural Council (NHC) represents apple, cherry, and pear growers, packers, and shippers in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.  NHC members grow, pack, and ship approximately 77% of the fresh apples, 78% of the fresh cherries, and 84% of the fresh pears, produced in the United States.  Approximately 30% of the total fresh crop from this region is exported to over 60 countries around the world.  It is vitally important that growers have safe and effective pesticide tools available to produce these crops.  The absence of coordinated information regarding pesticide application strategies to meet MRL requirements across all destination markets has created orchard management and marketing challenges for the industry and market penetration challenges for the crop protection chemical registrants when new active ingredients are introduced.  Furthermore, national authorities appear to be moving away from the reliance on the international standards established by Codex and developing their own regulatory systems.  This has presented additional challenges to fruit producers in an already complicated system of MRL compliance.  Additionally, the increasing use of biopesticides and other chemicals used in organic fruit production, which have exemptions from the requirement of a tolerance in the United States but there is no equivalent program in some countries, presents a new set of challenges for producers.  A discussion of grower responses to the challenges and ideas for ways to improve decision-making will be presented.

Challenges Pacific Northwest tree fruit producers have meeting MRL requirements when exporting fruit around the world

256th National Meeting (2018)

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