A Sault Ste. Marie forest biotech company is tied up in bureaucratic paperwork in getting their environmentally-friendly pesticide legalized in Canada.
Joe Meating, president of BioForest Technologies Inc., says they received a note from the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) of Health Canada with details of what information the government requires before the company can apply to register their TreeAzin product.
TreeAzin was first developed at a federal insect lab in the Sault and is being taken to market by Meating's company. The pesticide has proved successful in killing the emerald ash borer where outbreaks in ash trees have been detected in southwestern Ontario, the Sault, Montreal and Ottawa.
TreeAzin has already been approved for commercial use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
A Health Canada official told Northern Ontario Business this month the company has not filed an application with PMRA. Meating says that's true, but he has been waiting "eight months" just to have a pre-submission meeting to start the process.
Meating says they are quickly putting together an information package to submit TreeAzin for registration. "How long this process will take is anyone's guess. We will push hard for registration in 2009 but that may be optimistic."
He's hopeful of receiving an "emergency registration" from Health Canada to contain the Ontario outbreaks next year.
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