CFIA releases "What we heard report" on seed regulatory modernization

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has released a report on the latest recommendations and feedback relating to modernizing the seed regulations in Canada.

The process began in 2021 and covers several areas from import to export, seed conditioning, storage, testing and labeling to seed sales.

The National Manager for the Seed Section of the CFIA, Wendy Jahn says a number of the regulations, policies and programs interact with each other and rather than making changes one at a time it makes more sense to take a holistic approach to modernizing the system.

"It gives us the opportunity to step back, look at the regs and say what is working, and what isn't. Where does government need to be? Where doesn't it ? This is a great opportunity to make a number of changes all at once. "

Jahn notes the proposed recommendations came out of a co-development process with the grain industry involving farmers, the seed industry, public breeders, commodity groups and the grain industry and value chain all having an active role in the discussions.

"We wanted to make sure that the farmer customer and the downstream grain industry was part of this process. So we as part of co-development did a lot of stakeholder engagement. We made sure that we had balanced representation from the farmer/producer side, and grain were for those customers and we're balancing that with the seed industry. So that the seed industry who's most impacted directly because they're regulated parties was at the table, and then the consumer of seeds had a voice and they were also at the table. We wanted farmers and the grain industry to have a say."

The actual recommendations or ideas put forward come from the co-development process and consultations with stakeholders and industry working group members. As a result, the ideas are somewhat already vetted by the different parts of the seed value chain, before it was released to the broader stakeholder base.

Recommendations and other proposals that were supported - more than 60% of the 412 respondents supported the following statements.

- CFIA should take over the responsibility of determining variety certification eligibility for crops not subject to variety registration;