CLA president speaks at Informa conference

The keynote panel at the Informa Crops & Chemicals USA Conference on July 21 in Raleigh, North Carolina featured CropLife America’s President and CEO Jay Vroom.

The panel spoke on the efforts to unite the agrochemical, biocontrol, plant health and plant biotechnology industries to solve world hunger. The other panelists included David Beaudreau from the Biostimulant Coalition, Keith Jones from the Biopesticide Industry Alliance, Matthew Phillips from Phillips McDougall, and Nandini Mendu from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.

For Vroom’s part, he focused on making access to advanced tools easier to farmers and the government’s need to take more action in order for this access.

“Regulatory harmonization should be more advanced today than it is,” Vroom said. “Over the past 25 years, public and private organizations have devoted an inordinate amount of both time and financial resources to talking about harmonization of crop protection products. It’s time to make real progress and get necessary tools to farmers, to help them fight crop threats now. Efforts to harmonize Maximum Residue Levels (MRL) standards to facilitate trade in food and [agriculture] products have also fallen short.”

Vroom made sure to highlight the progress that has already been accomplished, especially in the area of the protection of regulatory data. Other topics covered at the conference were market development, seed applied technology, biostimulants and regulation.