Minor uses of plant protection products

 What are minor uses?
Minor uses are those uses of plant protection products (defined in relation to crops and pests) in which either the crop is considered to be of low economic importance at national level (minor crop), or the pest is of limited importance on a major crop (minor pest). It should be noted that a minor use in one country may be a major use in another country (each country is responsible for defining its minor uses).

 Limitations in plant protection
EPPO countries presently face problems in terms of crop protection product availability for minor crops. The processes of the current EU review of active substances and the rationalization of uses supported by approval holders are removing more and more useful products from the market. As a consequence, there are few products available even for some major uses.This concern was also expressed at our recent workshop on insecticide resistance in pollen beetle on oilseed rape regarding the impacts on the available resources for resistance management. Therefore, from the EPPO perspective, the minor uses of significance are those for which there are insufficient plant protection product uses, and the focus of the extrapolation work aims to mitigate these limitations.

 The development of mitigation strategies and tools
In 2003, EPPO published a standard (PP 1/224) describing the principles for determining the requirements for efficacy evaluation for minor uses of plant protection products in a registration procedure. The standard provides a definition of minor uses and guidance on where to seek data to demonstrate effectiveness and crop safety, in order to simplify the registration process. The Standard does not cover other minor use considerations such as residues and ecotoxicology.

Minor uses have also become an international issue and cooperation between countries has increased remarkably in recent years. However, coordination between all interested parties still needs to be facilitated and improved. In October 2006, EPPO organized a Workshop on Mutual Recognition of Minor Uses. The workshop addressed problems related to the authorization of minor uses and explored the opportunities for solutions based particularly around different forms of international cooperation, such as mutual recognition of authorizations and cooperation in data generation (view the Workhop conclusions and recommendations).

 The development of mitigation strategies and tools
One of main strategies proposed in order to address efficacy data requirements is to extrapolate from extant registered uses, and this was elaborated in a new EPPO standard (PP1/257) published in the Bulletin OEPP/EPPO Bulletin Vol. 37(3), December 2007. The EPPO standard is based on the extrapolation document developed by Pesticide Safety Directorate (PSD), the UK pesticide regulatory authority, which was awarded a contract by the European Commission to collect information on the various efficacy and crop safety extrapolations currently used by individual Member States. The document proposes specific efficacy and crop safety extrapolations in the form of tables.  These tables are considered a valuable source of information while EPPO develop a new set of tables for the whole EPPO region.