The global movement of grains and oilseeds has become increasingly more important to meet the world’s food security needs for a growing population, moving goods from areas of surplus into areas of deficit. These commodities move through a sophisticated system of international trade to provide safe, high volume, affordable, competitive, timely, predictable, responsive and resilient supply.  Regulatory approaches and policies around the world for crop protection products continue to put pressure on farmers who use these tools to combat a variety of production challenges. Continued use and future innovation in crop protection products depends on trade enabling and consistent regulatory outcomes and endpoints. Global disorganization in the establishment and enforcement of MRLs to manage crop protection products is impacting all U.S. agricultural sectors with increasing intensity. Grains and oilseeds have found growing complexities in trade of crops cultivated, stored and shipped with crop protection products. The success of U.S. agriculture is greatly dependent on the market access hurdles exacerbated by global policies and regulations which are misaligned or are not risk and science-based.  Missing and misaligned Maximum Residue Levels (MRLs) create significant uncertainty for the global grain trade. Zero or near-zero default tolerances, the application of different levels of MRLs in exporting and importing countries, or missing MRLs resulting from misaligned policies impede trade, food security and innovation. Regulatory coherence across exporting and importing countries is key to supporting grain trade for food, feed and processing and needs to result in manageable MRLs. Both government and private sector have a role in developing and implementing trade-enabling solutions, which can reduce the risk for market access challenges and also position U.S. grains and oilseeds to capture future opportunities.

Uncertainties maximum residue levels create for the global movement of grains and oilseeds

256th National Meeting (2018)

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