PRIMET-Ethiopia

PRIMET_Registration_Ethiopia 1.1

Background

The PRIMET_Registraton_Ethiopia 1.1 tool (Wipfler et al., 2014) is one of the products from the Pesticide Risk Reduction Program – Ethiopia. The tool enables the calculation of environmental and human risks as part of the registration process in Ethiopia. PRRP-Ethiopia is a comprehensive program that was initiated by the Government of Ethiopia to improve pesticide registration and management. In the program the Plant Health Regulatory Directorate (PHRD) of the Ministry of Agriculture of Ethiopia (MoA), Alterra, part of Wageningen UR (Netherlands) and the FAO of the United Nations work jointly together on pesticide risk reduction in Ethiopia. The program presents all aspects of pesticide legislation in agriculture and public health sectors, setting up a sustainable system and capacity building for pesticide registration and a holistic plan for post-registration aspects: monitoring, inspection, quality control, storage, capacity building.

PRIMET_Registraton_Ethiopia 1.1 builds further on PRIMET 2.0 and 3.0. The intended use of PRIMET 2.0 and 3.0 was to estimate environmental risk due to pesticide use and to raise awareness among farmers on pesticide negative impacts on humans and ecosystems. PRIMET has been redesigned and extended into the registration support tool PRIMET_Registraton_Ethiopia 1.1. The tool covers more protection goals than PRIMET 3.0 and is ready to be used for the pesticide registration in Ethiopia.

Addressed protection goals:

 

Human risks

 

  • Operator in greenhouse
  • Worker (indoor and outdoor)

 

Drinking water

  • Groundwater as source for drinking water (chronic risk)
  • Surface water as source for drinking water (chronic and acute risks)

 

Environmental risks

  • Aquatic ecosystem (chronic and acute risks)
  • Terrestrial ecosystem (chronic and acute risks)
  • Bees ( in-crop and off-crop exposure)
  • Non-target arthropods ( in-crop and off-crop exposure)
  • Birds (chronic and acute risks)
  • Non-target terrestrial plants

 

Auxiliary models

The software package of PRIMET_Registration_Ethiopia 1.1.zip is delivered including three auxiliary models. These models can be used independently of the PRIMET_Registration_Ethiopia 1.1.1.1.1 software. The protection goals covered by these external models are:

  • Operator outdoor risk ( the German model)
  • Consumer risk; chronic risk (IEDI calculation model) and acute risk (IESTI calculation model)

Risk quantification concepts

PRIMET_Registration_Ethiopia calculates for each protection goal the exposure concentration, the effect concentration and the Exposure Toxicity Ratio. For each of the protection goals risk criteria are predefined, interpreting the ETR values as an indicator for ‘no risk’, ‘possible risk’ or ‘high risk’.  In principle first tier risks are assessed. Higher tier options are only available for operators in greenhouse (allowing for personal protection equipment) and non-target arthropods ( allowing for a higher-tier effect assessment). 

All risk assessments are based on the assessments described in the PRRP-Ethiopia evaluation manual (Deneer et al., 2014) which describes the risk assessments to be performed by the pesticide registration authority. Needed data for the risk assessments have been described in a guideline used by the Plant Health Regulation Directorate of the Ministry of Agriculture of Ethiopia. Registration is requested for a product and its intended use, via a so-called Product Registration File (PRF). In PRIMET_Registration_Ethiopia each registration is interpreted as a number of unique combinations of active ingredient- crop- application scheme, relevant for the specific registration. Each of these combinations is called a project in the PRIMET_Registration_Ethiopia software.

For the protection goals ’Groundwater as source of drinking water’ and ‘Surface water as source for drinking water’ as well as for ‘Aquatic ecosystem’, specific Ethiopian exposure scenarios have been developed (Adriaanse et al., 2015). The exposure scenarios for surface water and aquatic ecosystems make use of the pesticide fate models TOXSWA  and FOCUS_PRZM_SW_3.1.1, which are installed along with the installation of PRIMET_Registration_Ethiopia. PRIMET_Registration_Ethiopia runs these models on the background and reads out the calculated exposure concentrations automatically for further use in the risk assessment.