Review of invertebrate biological control agent regulation in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA: recommendations for a harmonized European system

Europe lags far behind Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA in terms of implementing regulatory procedures for the import and release of invertebrate biological control agents (IBCAs). A number of standards, documents and guidelines have been produced over recent years in an attempt to harmonize regulation of IBCA introduction into Europe. Despite these efforts, the number of member countries implementing any form of IBCA regulation remains low, with many industries, biological practitioners and regulators fearing that a regulatory system would render the process of approval for IBCA introduction into a country costly and time consuming. Europe's priority is therefore to formulate a regulatory system that will be readily approved of and adopted by all member countries. In this paper we review the current regulatory processes operating in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. There is potential for Europe to benefit from the years of experience that these countries have in IBCA regulation. We therefore propose recommendations based on features of the regulatory processes in each of the four countries that work well and that could be adopted to generate a workable Europe-wide regulatory system.