Pesticide goods including in “Inventory of Dangerous Goods”(GB12268) with low toxicity which were packaged in limited amount can be exempted from China's Regulation on Road Transport of Hazardous Goods to some extent. 

Last week, China Ministry of Transportation(MOT) announced an official letter to its provincial bureau, Transportation Department of Gansu, ruled that seizure of the 77.5% dichlorvos EC from Nantong Jiangshan by Gansu local transportation administration in late April was inappropriate and the bureau should release the pesticide goods soon.

On April 29th, 316 pieces of Jiangshan’s dichlorvos goods to an agrochemical company was seized by Gansu’s Transport bureau for violating China’s regulation on transportation of hazardous goods, the “Regulation on Road Transport of Dangerous Goods”. Thus Jiangshan appealed to MOT for help, and MOT agreed that the goods belongs in liquid organophosphate pesticide, which included in “Inventory of Dangerous Goods” (GB12268), shall not be subject to the transport regulatory measures on hazardous goods as the low toxicity pesticide goods with limited amount of packages shall be regard as general goods in transportation. The MOT urged Gansu Transportation Department to make prompt release on the goods in consideration of currently farming season in north-western China.

China’s administration on road transports of hazardous goods was based on “Regulation on Road Transport of Hazardous Goods”, which stipulated that the goods including in the “inventory of Dangerous goods”(GB12268) and other goods considered as hazardous by other regulations shall be governed under the "Regulation on Road Transport of Hazardous Goods". The GB 12268 not only listed the hazardous goods but also detailed the toxic classification, coding, packaging of the hazardous goods. For crop protection products, more than 100 kinds of pesticides have been listed in the inventory, they including: the carbamates, the organophosphorus, the copper based, the mecury based compounds, the arsenicals compounds, the organochlorines, the triazines, the thiocarbamates, the substituted nitrophenols, the organotins, etc.

However, the agrochemical industry argued that most the pesticide products presented in China'scrop protection market have been included in the inventory while some more hazardous pesticides were not  yet listed, and the safety for transport of a pesticide goods shall not only simply be judged by the inclusion or not. The “one-size-fits-all” criteria for transport administration by the inventory on pesticides will result in the paradox that in one hand large numbers of pesticide goods in need  were subject to unnecessary stringent supervision and usually cannot be applied for crop protection timely, on the other hand that some unlisted but indeed hazardous pesticide goods were transported and handled as normal goods.

Consequently, the Ministry of transportation, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Public Security and State Administration of Work Safety jointly issued in 2009 a measure on transport administration of pesticides, the "circular about pesticide transportation", which regulated that the pesticides goods with toxic and flammability properties below category Ⅲ (UN Recommendations on the Transport of Dangerous Goods, or the contained ingredients are registered as low toxicity and slight toxicity by ICAMA) can be regard and regulated as general goods for transportation provided that the goods are compliantly packaged in limited amount and  labeled with marks on the outer-packages.

Nantong Jiangshan is among the top agrochemical companies in China, with annual sales of over 1 billion Yuan in overseas market. However it has suffered net earning decline recently, mainly due to rising costs in glyphosate and dichlorvos business.

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