New legislations were adopted on 1st October requiring extra labelling for parallel pesticides imports into the UK. Parallel imports are the ones that are manufactured by the brand owners that are already commended in the UK market but sourced from EU distributors.
The new legislation requires that parallel imports should contain the unique batch number as well as an individual Ministerially Approved Pesticide Product (Mapp) number. These numbers are granted to genuine products.
According to Tom O’Mahony, who is the managing director in Clayton Plant Protection that imports parallel products, asserts that Mapp numbers for each member country indicate multiple numbers for similar products, and this will result in complexity, confusion, and additional costs. The importers are required to print all the original batch numbers. This is essential in identifying the European suppliers.
The UK farmers are currently fighting low wheat and oilseed prices. According to Mahony, “Farmers need the permission to buy cheaper inputs wherever they can, as long as they are of good quality and are proved to be similar to other branded products”, he said, “These new legislations make life even hard and will not hinder companies that have not complied with these legislations in bringing counterfeit, low-quality material from fake manufacturers, which mostly comes from countries outside the EU."
According to Graham Dickinson, who is a director for national distributor Frontier in crop protection, parallel imports sector needs to be as healthy as possible in the midst of all these legislations. He says that ”Parallel import products are an important sector of the market that ensures stability in the supply of products even when main suppliers are not in a position to supply in time and season. However, we only trade with genuine companies with genuine products”.
Mr. Dickinson adds that the different Mapp numbers for the identical products will lead to confusion and other big issues related to farm management programmes like the Gatekeeper. He says in his view that this measure could be recognized as non-competitive
Finally, he concludes that the new legislation will not help in curbing confusion on parallel products imports, and the farmers will not get cheaper products. Hence everything will continue as before.
