CropLife Australia Demands Government Intervention as Regulator’s Own Data Show Pesticide Approvals Stalling

26 October 2026, Melbourne: Australia’s crop protection industry body has escalated its campaign against the national pesticide regulator, saying the regulator’s own performance figures prove farmers are being denied timely access to new chemistry. CropLife Australia issued a statement on October 22, 2026, titled “Denial is not a recovery plan,” arguing that the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) is showing a sustained decline in performance despite lower workloads and higher funding. 

CropLife’s chief executive, Matthew Cossey, said the regulator was “doing considerably less work, considerably slower, with more resources” than before, and described the problem as one of performance rather than workload. He said a failure of this scale would normally trigger a change in board and senior management, and he accused the APVMA of making excuses rather than owning the problem.

The dispute centers on the APVMA’s quarterly performance reports, which the regulator itself publishes. For the January to March 2026 quarter, the APVMA’s own data show that only 43.9 percent of major agricultural chemical applications, a category covering significant new crop protection technologies and uses, were completed within the statutory timeframe (25 of 57 applications). CropLife says that single figure translates into a backlog of more than 200 agricultural product registrations sitting outside their legal deadlines, a number broadly consistent with the APVMA’s own tracking of applications in progress.

CropLife says the pre-application assistance service, which previously helped companies prepare stronger applications before formal submission, has effectively been discontinued. The APVMA disputes this characterization, saying it introduced a new approach rather than abandoning the service, and that the change lets staff concentrate on core regulatory assessment work. The regulator maintains that its overall performance is satisfactory.

A second front in the dispute concerns the APVMA’s cost-recovery model. CropLife has argued in earlier statements this year that proposed changes to how the regulator recovers its costs from industry would raise fees sharply and could discourage companies from bringing new products to the Australian market. The APVMA has defended the revised model as a fairer allocation of costs across all participants in the registration system.

CropLife is calling on the APVMA board and senior leadership to publish a measurable, time-bound recovery plan for agricultural chemical registrations rather than general assurances, and is asking the federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry to ensure the regulator delivers timely and predictable assessments. The association has also flagged a separate, unresolved compliance issue involving registered products with multiple formulations, which it says is consuming regulatory resources that would otherwise go toward clearing the backlog. The APVMA has said that issue is administrative rather than a safety or efficacy concern.

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