costa ricas regulation on registration use and control of pesticides and related substances in june 2016 israel raised its concern on costa ricas regulation on registration use and control of pesticides which had been notified to the sps committee as g sps n cri 48 add.1. this regulation implemented new requirements for the re-registration of pesticides in current use and the registration of new pesticides. israel was concerned that the registration process had become inefficient and prohibitive to trade as the prescribed timeframes for the processing of registration requests indicated in the regulation were not being respected by the relevant costa rican authorities. according to the regulation the requests were first processed by the ministry of agriculture and then the ministry of health and environment which each had u to 60 working days to analyse evaluate and resolve requests. however no response or feedback on the assessment and progress of requests had been received in relation to numerous outstanding requests from israel since 2011. israel reminded costa rica of its obligation to ensure that sps measures were not applied in a manner which could constitute a disguised restriction on international trade and that procedures were undertaken and completed without undue delay including the transmission of relevant information to applicants in a timely manner. israel recognized costa ricas right to regulate and to take into account environmental considerations but observed that israeli companies had not been able to register their products since the implementation of the new regulation. israel requested that costa rica adhere to the timeframes mandated in its regulation and provide the necessary feedback to applicants. costa rica explained that it had faced a number of difficulties related to the registration of pesticides which had led to a significant delay in the processing of applications. in order to resolve these difficulties the government of costa rica had been given the task of proposing reforms to the applicable rules of the registration process. this process was in its final stages and the resulting proposal would be notified in the coming weeks to both the sps and tbt committees in order to provide members with an opportunity to submit comments within an identified deadline. costa rica expressed its willingness to engage with israel and other interested members