The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set a permanent tolerance for the herbicide acifluorfen on sugar beet, ending growers' reliance on year-by-year emergency exemptions. The rule, requested by UPL NA Inc., the US arm of the Mumbai-based agrochemical group UPL, was published in the Federal Register on 29 September 2026 and took effect the same day.
The new tolerance sets a maximum residue limit of 0.06 parts per million for sugar beet roots. The EPA revoked the older tolerances of 0.1 ppm for roots and tops that applied only under Section 18 emergency exemptions, and withdrew a proposed limit for tops after concluding they are not a significant livestock feed, so the permanent limit covers only the root that is processed into sugar.
Acifluorfen, sold since the 1980s as Blazer, is a PPO-inhibitor herbicide that blocks an enzyme plants need to make chlorophyll. It is registered on soybeans, peanuts, peas and rice against broadleaf weeds such as pigweed and morning glory, but sugar beet was not on its label, so growers used it through annual exemptions against hard-to-control broadleaf weeds.
A permanent tolerance gives growers and the sugar processors who buy their beet certainty that the chemistry will stay legally available from season to season, instead of depending on a new exemption petition each year.
Photo: Blonder1984 / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Source: Global Agriculture
Comments
(0)