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Pesticides: Regulating Pesticides
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Pesticide Tolerances

EPA sets limits on the amount of pesticides that may remain in or on foods. These limits are called tolerances. The tolerances are set based on a risk assessment and are enforced by the Food and Drug Administration.

The pesticide tolerances that were in place as of August 1996, when the Food Quality Protection Act was signed, are subject to reassessment. This reassessment process is scheduled for completion in 2006

Actions on Pesticide Tolerances

EPA publishes a notice in the Federal Register for several tolerance-related actions:

These notices are available at www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/.

In addition, if an objection to a tolerance is filed, EPA will make this information available.

Sources of Information on Tolerances

Tolerances are published in the Code of Federal Regulations.

In addition, there are several sources of information on pesticide tolerances:

  • an EPA database that allows searching by crop or by pesticide for tolerance information
  • Changes to tolerances and new tolerances are published in the Federal Register.
  • The National Pesticide Information Retrieval System (NPIRS) includes a Tolerance Index database as one of its set of six subscription access online databases. These databases are offered and maintained by the Center for Environmental and Regulatory Information Systems (CERIS) at Purdue University. Exit EPA disclaimer

The Food and Feed Commodity Vocabulary consolidates all the major Office of Pesticide Programs Commodity Vocabularies into one standardized vocabulary. Each lookup term is assigned an EPA preferred term, an EPA (40 CFR 180.41) crop group name/number, and a monograph number where further information about a specific commodity can be found. The preferred term will be the only term accepted in establishing pesticide tolerances.

 

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