Colleague Shimat Joseph and I happened into CDPR head Brian Leahy at an ANR meeting in Sacramento this past week, and as expected we got to talking about what the hold up is with the sulfoxaflor (Sequioa) registration for control of lygus on strawberries.  Readers of this blog know that this is a pretty good material for lygus, and it's been a bit frustrating to not have the registration be approved yet.

Brian helpfully clarified to us that the approval for sulfoxaflor (Sequioa) was vacated in a Federal ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco in September. 

The ruling was in regards to a lawsuit filed in 2013 against the US EPA, which is responsible for the registration of pesticides in the US (California has an additional layer of regulation through the CDPR), by the beekeeping industry which challenged EPA approval of neonicotinoids, of which sulfoxaflor was ruled to be a subclass. 

This last point is arguable, since while sulfoxaflor targets the same receptors in the insect as a neonicotinoid, it belongs to a different class of chemistry, the sulfoxamines.

With regards to future registration of this product, the court said that the EPA "must obtain further data regarding the effects of sulfoxaflor on bees... before it grants approval."

The EPA has yet to formulate a response to this decision.