MULTAN, Sept 15: The meeting of Agricultural Pesticides Technical Advisory Committee held in Islamabad on Wednesday could not discuss the vital issues owing to 'paucity of time'.
Federal Agriculture Secretary Ismail Qureshi was scheduled to chair the meeting at 2:00 p.m. but he reportedly came late by an hour only to put off the crucial matters on the agenda for the next meeting.
According to the sources, only the minor issues could be discussed, such as new registrations, expansion of labels and approval of new recipes and formulations. Representatives of the four provincial governments, pesticides business and grower organizations were assembled to discuss issues crucial to the pesticides sector.
The meeting was convened to review various clauses of the statutory notifications (SROs) 399(I)/2004, 21(I)/2004 and 77(KE)/2004. The SRO 21(I)/2004 issued on January 16, 2004 was the outcome of the 36th meeting of the Aptac held on May 31, 2003.
In that meeting of the Aptac, it was recommended that in future the importers should themselves pack the pesticides in retail packing under their own label and warranty before passing on to the distributor or dealer (as the case may be). Besides, the price mentioned on label should be the same which the importers have mentioned while paying the government duties including sales tax.
Furthermore, the pesticides firms were asked to pack their products in uniform quantities of 250ml, 500ml or 1000ml instead of currently in vogue deceptive packing of 400ml and 800ml etc. It was then decided that the Aptac recommendations would be enforced through statutory notification by November 1, 2003.
However, the deadline could not be met allegedly due to some vested interests and the matter lingered on one pretext or another until the issuance of SRO 21(I). Although, the SRO was not completely in line with the Aptac recommendations but the people in pesticides business who believed in fair play welcomed it as a step towards assurance of quality products at affordable prices to the growers.
Analysts of the pesticides business said that though the SRO 21 could not be implemented in letter and spirit due to weak monitoring of the departments concerned but even then the complaints of adulterated and substandard pesticides were less this year than the preceding years.
Sources disclosed that the representative of the Punjab government in Wednesday's meeting urged the federal government to call an inter-provincial meeting to review the statutory notifications issued this year vis-à-vis regulations of pesticides business in the country.