AFPA members include native forest managers, plantation growers, and wood and paper product manufacturers. These industries use relatively small amounts of agricultural and veterinary (agvet) chemicals when compared with other larger agricultural sectors.
However, chemical use is critical to maintaining and improving the industry’s productivity and competitiveness to meet Australia’s wood fibre and product needs into the future. As such, AFPA has a strong interest in agvet chemical regulation reform. In principle, AFPA supports reform processes that remove red-tape by improving the efficiency of regulation and regulatory bodies, and create more certainty for all stages of the agvet assessment and registration process.
AFPA’s submission builds on our earlier submissions on previous reform resulting in the Agvet Chemicals Legislation Amendment Act 2013 (2013 Act) and subsequent parliamentary committee considerations. This submission provides comment on the key issues addressed in the Bill and highlights important additional areas of reform that are needed.