Croplife America: its history and accomplishments.

CropLife America (CLA), a national trade association which represents virtually all the leading U.S. crop protection companies, has encountered a remarkable mosaic of twists and turns during its 75-year history. The challenges and changes which CLA has managed include a constantly evolving landscape of industry companies and products, coupled with a mind-boggling array of public policy and communications issues attendant to modern crop protection tools.

The Washington, D.C.-based group, which has had four different names since its 1933 inception in New York City, currently has 66 members, including basic pesticide manufacturers, formulators, and distributors. Its annual budget is more than $9 million.

CropLife activities run the gamut from Capitol Hill lobbying to litigation to scientific task force coordination to the endless task of studying, and responding to regulatory proposals from federal and, in some cases, state agencies. The group also communicates the benefits of pesticides to policy makers and the general public.

The association's research and education affiliate, the CropLife Foundation, conducts a wide range of studies and message development in support of the crop protection industry. At the same time, CLA's companion organization, RISE (Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment), engages in various advocacy efforts on behalf of specialty pesticides used in non agricultural markets--for turf management, nurseries, landscaping, disease vector control and structural pest control to name just a few segments RISE represents.

Allan Noe, Dir of Special Projects for CropLife and VP, Development for the CropLife Foundation, points out that CLA is in tune with crop protection issues and developments far beyond U.S. borders.

"We have a global network under the umbrella of CropLife International consisting of national associations in more than 90 countries, including one of our newest affiliates, CropLife China," Noe says. "This helps facilitate coordination of plant science goals and objectives throughout the world, including intellectual property protection."

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Considering the early CLA predecessor entities dealt with greater numbers of member companies in a different market era and simpler and fewer issues, it's clear the association has had to dramatically change the scope of its work to maintain its strong advocacy success record for the crop protection industry.

CLA Pres Jay Vroom, who grew up on a family farm near Princeton, IL, and majored in agricultural science at the University of Illinois, has navigated through some of the most difficult of these changes during his nearly 20 years at the helm.

"I started work at the association, then known as the National Agricultural Chemicals Association (NACA), barely three months before the 'Alar crisis' erupted," Vroom recalls. "Fortunately for me and the industry, member companies were already preparing for something big before I arrived. We quickly assembled a special Food Safety Task Force of the NACA Board, gathered our resources and prepared for what turned into quite a media storm."

PIVOTAL YEAR

"1996 was one of the most pivotal years in the crop protection industry's policy history," Vroom says. "It was the culmination of our success in staving off bad policy reactions from the Alar scare, and turning that into the most comprehensive pesticide reform legislative packages ever enacted.

"Of course, even though this major environmental law, the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), was passed without a single dissenting vote in either the House or Senate, it was still far from a perfect law. But again with strong support and involvement of farm groups and the food industry, coupled with a sound political set of relationships in the Clinton Administration and in Congress, we were successful in steering a reasonable implementation of a law that took ten years, until August 2006, to deploy."

Vroom reports, "The experiences of working across broad and active coalitions which we built in dealing with passage of the Delaney Clause reform and all the rest of the provisions of FQPA ... and the ensuing work to ensure reasonable implementation of that sweeping law, have forged the pathways for CLA to deal with a host of other significant issues challenging our members."

He cites the challenges of the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act as examples of current issues that continue to be addressed by multifaceted coalitions which CLA helps lead.

The impacts of the transformations in pesticide regulation and industry consolidation over the past 20 years have had both positive and negative consequences for the industry. "At CLA we always strive to advocate policy that affords opportunity for forward-looking companies to keep advancing scientific and technological solutions, to improve our farm customer's economic outcomes and enhance safety and environmental protection," says Vroom.

Looking forward, the only certainty is much more change is probably on the way. It is also certain that the executives who led CLA precursor groups in the '20s, '30s and '40s never could have imagined the regulatory challenges faced by their successors.

THE BEGINNING

CLA officially evolved from the Agricultural Insecticide and Fungicide (AIF) Association which was formed by the Insecticide Committee of the Agricultural Insecticides and Manufacturers Association (AIFMA) in 1933. Lee Hitchner was elected as the first Pres and served in that capacity until 1962. To date, Hitchner is the longest-tenured Pres of the association and its most acclaimed annual award is named for him.

FIFRA '47

The modern era of pesticide regulation started in 1947, with the passage of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). The law granted the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) the authority to regulate pesticides at the national level and, for the first time, required all pesticide products to be registered and labeled with much more information.

Because FIFRA was to be administered by a federal agency, the AIF relocated to Washington, D.C., and changed its name to the National Agricultural Chemicals Association (NACA).

However, it was actually the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which elicited the lion's share of NACA's attention during the 1950s. It was then that, for the first time, pesticide residue tolerances were established for agricultural commodities.

NACA had successfully lobbied Congress to include language requiring a scientific basis for tolerances in the enabling legislation of 1954, and NACA coordinated industry input into the tolerance regulation eventually issued by FDA.

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NACA had supported the tolerance legislation. However, in 1958, an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act directed FDA to prohibit the use of any known, or suspected, carcinogens, as food additives. NACA's lobbying efforts precluded the application of this amendment, known as the Delaney Clause, to pesticide residues in crops, although the use of specific pesticides on some processed, or semi-processed food and feed products triggered a Delaney requirement for tolerances.

Delaney would remain in place, and cause a great deal of controversy, for the next 38 years.

"SILENT SPRING"

In the early 1960s, NACA launched a major pesticide safety campaign, including a new iteration of its 1943 "Read the Label" campaign. The outreach effort included posters, leaflets, special product labels, TV and radio announcements, and newspaper editorials.

But, the campaign was overshadowed by the publication of "Silent Spring," a book which sparked public fears about pesticides and led to a series of Congressional hearings and federal studies. The book also led, if indirectly, to the tougher data requirements mandated in the 1972 amendments to FIFRA.

FIFRA '72

The Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 shifted the regulatory purview over pesticides and pesticide tolerances from USDA and FDA, respectively, to the newly established Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The law ushered in a period of intense activity at NACA because so many things changed and no one knew how the law would affect the industry.

The '70s and '80s were formative and formidable times for NACA because the association was part of the process to implement and understand FIFRA '72. There was a lot of brainstorming going on and varying expectations among different member companies regarding ultimate interpretation of the new law.

NEW LEADERSHIP

Parke Brinkley was Pres of NACA at this time, having succeeded Lea Hitchner who retired in 1962. Brinkley was approaching retirement himself and industry leaders decided to bring aboard an experienced industry scientist and regulatory expert, Jack Early, from the Monsanto Company.

PATENTS AND DATA

Early faced a host of difficult issues, particularly the lobbying effort to increase patent life for novel molecules. For the crop protection industry, the plea for patent restoration was driven by the uncertain, and often extremely long, approval process for new active ingredients under the data requirements of FIFRA '72.

Driven by the new law's expanded data requirements and the fact that a new regulatory entity, the EPA, was now reviewing and approving pesticide licenses, the regulatory process started to consume 14 or more years of the then 17-year patent life.

Meanwhile, NACA was also lobbying for data protection to ensure that companies which paid for the cost of data necessary to obtain EPA registrations for new pesticides, and new uses of previously registered pesticides, were compensated for the use of that data by follow-on registrants. In 1978, Congress amended FIFRA to provide those protections, but NACA was unsuccessful in its efforts to obtain patent restoration for new molecules.

Congress granted patent restoration to the pharmaceutical industry, but not to the pesticide industry. But the pesticide industry did not, in the process, yield to certain other concessions that the pharmaceutical industry agreed to in order to get their patent restoration legislation. In the end, some products benefited from this outcome while others may have had a better result had the pesticide patent extension passed.

THE DATA FOCUS

Because FIFRA '72 increased the data requirements necessary to obtain registrations, NACA sharpened its focus on the science underlying pesticide regulation. Under 1978 amendments to FIFRA, moreover, the law required companies to provide EPA with all reports, anecdotal or otherwise, of adverse effects from their products.

This prompted one company "to back up a truck at the EPA office at Waterside Mall and dump a huge pile of documents at the Agency's door," recalls one industry veteran, adding, "EPA charged them with 'malicious compliance!'"

FIFRA '78 also required EPA to expeditiously re-register all pesticides, but the agency was going very slowly. EPA was re-registering only one or two pesticides a year, and so, Congress in 1988 amended FIFRA to speed up the process. Congress kept churning out additional regulatory burdens, and there were some companies which, by the late 1980s, were finding the burden of complying with the new regulatory burdens impossible--and that's when significant consolidation in the industry began.

THE 1990s

Ray McAllister, who joined NACA in 1988 as Dir, Regulatory Affairs, says the re-registration overhaul once again changed the regulatory landscape for EPA and industry.

"The re-registration process mandated by FIFRA '88 was new for everyone," McAllister recalls. "EPA had to develop entirely new procedures, which created a healthy tension between industry and the agency. We didn't always agree with their re-registration decisions, but they were open to our input."

In 1994, NACA was renamed the American Crop Protection Association (ACPA) to reflect a new focus on biotechnology and the desire to rebrand the industry for what it does--protect crops. However, while ACPA played a key role in the development of EPA registration procedures for biotech "plant incorporated protectants," the dominant, regulatory event of the 1990's continued to revolve around traditional chemical crop protection products.

In 1996, a compromise agreement among environmentalists, ACPA and key lawmakers led to the abolition of the aforementioned Delaney Clause and enactment of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA). No one involved in the negotiations to package this major change to the pesticide laws fully understood the implications of the magnitude of the work EPA would need to complete-hard deadlines which directed EPA to review nearly 10,000 pesticide tolerances with a level of scrutiny that actually required EPA to invent new science.

Although the use of some major products has been severely restricted, and a few products have been withdrawn from the marketplace, the participation of ACPA in the scientific evaluations of FQPA implementation helped save innumerable crop protection products from cancellation.

While the tolerance reassessments mandated by the FQPA are largely finished, the impacts of the FQPA are far from over. Its mandate for endocrine disruptor screening remains a work-in-progress, but the program promises to raise enormous scientific controversy once it is launched.

Litigation has become an increasingly valuable tool for the association. "During our most challenging days of FQPA implementation, we brought legal action against EPA to challenge certain stages of the agency's process--we ultimately resolved these issues out of court, but we got the correct end-policy result," says CLA Exec VP and General Counsel Doug Nelson. "Since then, we've turned to the courts to seek proactive solutions on a number of issues, and, of course, take strong defensive positions when our industry and/or the EPA are under attack."

LOOKING AHEAD

Political action and activity are also strong suits of the association. Beau Greenwood, CLA Exec VP, Government Affairs says, "CLA's political action committee enables our association to support candidates for Congress who commit to the concept of hard science based regulations, and oppose politically motivated pesticide product decision making."

CLA and its members have come a long way in 75 years--but they all see that 75 years young is just the beginning. The real production demands on farmers to meet the food needs of 8 to 10 billion people, plus their fiber needs from cotton and renewable fuel needs, mean the needs for crop protection only soar into the future.

"Our members are ready, and CropLife America and our global network must be there to bring common industry positions together to deal with the health and safety issues and public communications outreach which will be even more critical to our industry's future than it has been in the past," Vroom concludes.

by the agrimarketing editors and contributors