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Prepared by Consumers Union Washington, D.C.
September, 1998
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THE SKY IS FALLING!
"Instead of homegrown fresh fruits and vegetables, expect them to be trucked in from other countries. Cherries, peaches and other fruits will likely come from South America. Our farmers will not be able to protect their crops economically enough to compete in the world market."
--Dr. Carl K. Winter, Editorial in Washington State Newspapers, June 1998"For the vast majority of threatened pesticides, there are no alternatives in the development pipeline."
--Dean Kleckner, American Farm Bureau, April 1998"I'm hearing that even in America we could be facing food shortages."
--Representative Helen Chenoweth (R-ID), July 1998
Fear and loathing stalk the corridors of Washington. The ominous prospect that the Federal Government may regulate pesticide residues in the diet more effectively, to make foods safer for children to eatóas required by a law that Congress passed unanimously in 1996óhas alarmist rhetoric flying around the Capitol like yellow jackets around a cider jug. Pesticide manufacturers, playing on farmers' legitimate anxieties about the potential loss of valuable insecticides, have spread rumors of a draconian government ban and have whipped up panic, hoping to stall implementation of the new law.
For more than a year, an uneasy truce held while all players in the pesticide debate waited to see how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would implement the tough new law, called the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA). But as the EPA began considering steps needed to attain the Act's health goals, it became clear that substantial changes in ways pesticides are used in food production will be required, and old, familiar battles erupted anew. As the outcry from the pesticide industry and growers has mounted, and their allies in Congress and the White House have urged EPA to slow down, public health and environmental advocates, in turn, have stepped up their own efforts to keep the promise of the FQPA alive.
At the heart of the anti-FQPA campaign is a rumor that EPA is planning an immediate ban of an entire class of insecticides, the organophosphates (OPs for short). More than 25 OP chemicals play an important role in farm production. They are registered for over 600 specific crop uses. A fear campaign built on the premise that EPA is about to ban the entire category, including about a dozen infrequently used OPs, has generated a drumbeat of propaganda: No alternatives exist for these insecticides; growers can't get along without them; EPA is out of control, about to impose irrational regulations that will jeopardize farmers' livelihoods and even the security of the food supply itself.
The message, in a nutshell, is that the sky is falling. In the familiar fable, it was Chicken Little who started that rumor, and soon had all other chickens in a tizzy. Let's listen in on the FQPA version of the tale:
"If FQPA implementation continues in this manner, sooner or later, virtually all pesticides and pesticide uses will be jeopardized. From wormy apples in agriculture, to cockroaches in the kitchen and crabgrass choking the lawn, Americans in every walk of life will miss the benefits of effective pest control."
--American Crop Protection Association, statement on ACPA web site, July 1998"Without the OPs and carbamates, crop yields would drop significantly and certain crops simply could not be grown."
--Ibid., August 1998"If, as has been rumored, EPA cancelled all OP registrations at once an outbreak of the Mediterranean fruit fly in California or Florida could quickly devastate as much as 50 percent or more of each state's fresh produce business. In apple-growing regions, growers would find their crops so infested by insect larvae that the fresh-apple market would be virtually destroyed."
--Ibid., August 1998"In my mind, FQPA stands for ëfarmers quit planting in America'."
--A farmer from Michigan, quoted on the ACPA web site, July 1998."FQPA could become Idaho agriculture's Waterloo, its Gettysburg, it's that seriousOPs are our antibiotics, carbamates our sulfa drugs."
--Pat Takasugi, Idaho Dept. of Agriculture, at EPA hearing in Boise, July 1998"Unless FQPA is implemented fairly, small family operated farms will be forced out of business."
--A grower from Houston, TX, quoted on the ACPA web site, August 1998"Maybe the EPA will do the right thing. Maybe it won't drive fruit and vegetable prices up, ensuring that children eat less of them. Maybe it won't kill asthmatic children by banning potent roach-killing sprays."
--Michael Fumento, Op Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, April 1998"Act now! Or this may be the only pest control tool you'll ever use again!"
--Ad, sponsored by the ACPA and others; the ad pictures a flyswatter."Without [the OPs], farmers would face lower yields and more expensive alternatives to fight voracious insects. Some estimates indicate costs to agriculture could soar by $2 billion a year, which in turn would raise food costs."
--American Farm Bureau press release, April 1998"The EPA has completely ignored the intent of this law and appears to be pushing their own extremist agendaplacing in jeopardy thousands of jobs in American agriculture."
--Press release, Office of Congressman Charles Stenholm (D-Texas), February 1998"Our frustration grows each time we hear farmers describing the economic ruin they will face if EPA continues with their current implementation of FQPA. Congress did not authorize EPA to implement a chemophobic agenda and jeopardize the availability of food to our children.
--Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) at an Agriculture Committee hearing in June, 1998
This campaign has worked, as political fear campaigns often do. Publicity in farm districts provoked a stream of mail from alarmed constituents, and aroused pro-agriculture members of Congress. EPA could see which way the wind was blowing on Capitol Hill, and began tacking. Vice President Gore leapt into the fray in April, instructing the EPA and the Department of Agriculture together to make sure that all affected interests, especially those of agriculture, are taken into account as FQPA implementation proceeds.
In response to the Vice President's intervention, EPA and USDA set up a Tolerance Reassessment Advisory Committee (TRAC), a multi-stakeholder advisory group. Whether TRAC has brought EPA advice the agency would not have gotten in any case is unclear, but one thing is certainóthe TRAC process has created numerous opportunities to slow FQPA implementation. Among other things, TRAC meetings have confronted EPA with arguments that, regardless of the public-health benefits of restricting the OPs and other high-risk pesticides, agriculture simply can't get along without them.
The Chicken Little fable we all heard as children ends tragically: A fox tells the panicked chickens the sky is indeed falling, invites them to take shelter in his den, and eats them. Perhaps this sad ending could have been averted if some wiser creatureólet's say, an owlóhad been there to say "Poppycock! The sky isn't falling! Stop this nonsense!" Even in Washington, in theory, a calm look at the facts and cool heads might restore sanity, once in a while.
To quell the anti-FQPA panic, we need an owl's-eye view of what the law requires EPA to do and how those goals could be achieved, and a wider awareness of the many alternatives readily available to growers to manage pests, if high-risk pesticide uses are indeed banned or severely restricted.
The source of all this anxiety is a law passed two years ago with almost no legislative wrangling. After years of stalemates in which neither industry interests nor environmental and public-health advocates had the votes to pass a pesticide regulatory reform bill over the other side's opposition, the combination of scientific consensus and election-year politics broke the log jam in 1996. Congress passed the FQPA that summer without a dissenting voteóthe bill flew through both the House and the Senate in a matter of days, and President Clinton quickly signed it into law, beaming children at his side, radiating confidence that safer food would soon be at hand.
The FQPA aimed to solve myriad problems in pesticide regulation as carried out by the EPA. The so-called "Delaney Clause," a provision of various food safety laws that bans the knowing addition of any carcinogenic substance to foods, had in theory prohibited residues of most carcinogenic pesticides in processed foods. "In theory," because the ban had rarely been enforced, but a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council had, by 1996, put EPA on the brink of enforcing it. Passage of the FQPA avoided that, and replaced the "zero risk" approach of the Delaney Clause with a decision rule based on risk assessment, much preferred by the affected industries.
The FQPA establishes a single health-based standard for both processed and raw foods, and defines "safety" as "a reasonable certainty of no harm" to public health. This uniform standard, first proposed by a National Research Council study a decade earlier (NRC 1987), is a more "scientific" approach to risk management, and was welcomed by most parties.
But the FQPA also goes much farther than previous laws in specifying that foods should be "safe" for everyoneóespecially for infants, young children, and pregnant women. In doing so, the new law is Congress's response to a growing scientific consensus, best expressed in another National Research Council report, Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children (NRC 1993). That report identified several shortcomings in the way EPA has traditionally set legal limits for pesticides in foods (called tolerances) and concluded that existing tolerances do not provide an adequate safety margin for our most vulnerable citizens.
The NRC committee suggested that EPA apply an additional 10-fold margin of safety in setting acceptable levels of pesticide exposure, to better ensure safety for infants and children. It also recommended that pesticides that share the same mechanism of toxicityósuch as the OP insecticidesóbe treated as a single hazard, since effects of multiple residues with the same toxic mechanism are likely to add up. It urged EPA, when setting tolerances, to account for non-dietary pesticide exposure, which occurs from drinking water and from pesticide use around the home, lawn and garden and in public buildings like schools, as well as for dietary exposure. Most importantly, the 1993 report urged that EPA's assessments of exposure to pesticides should reflect the unique, often higher exposures that infants and children receive from foods and other sources.
The FQPA incorporates those recommendations of the scientific community. It requires that EPA include, in most cases, an additional 10-fold margin of safety in setting safe exposure levels. Plus, the agency must account for all routes of exposure and the potentially greater susceptibility of infants and children. The law also spells out how EPA should deal with scientific uncertainty with respect to children's safety. Only when there is positive evidence that exposures are safe for infants and children can EPA elect not to include the additional 10-fold safety margin. If the agency has insufficient data to establish "reasonable certainty of no harm," the additional 10-fold safety margin is mandatory.
The FQPA also requires EPA to treat pesticides with a common toxic mechanism as a single hazard, and obligates EPA to consider dietary and non-dietary exposures in an integrated way.
The FQPA gives EPA some latitude to assess risks and set priorities, and like other pesticide laws, it sets deadlines for agency actions. By August of next year, for example, EPA must have completed its review of one-third of the existing 9,000 or so tolerances covering registered pesticide uses on food. The Act directs EPA to focus first on uses posing the greatest health risks, bringing those tolerances into compliance with the new safety standard of the Act. As EPA began wrestling with the challenge of setting priorities and choosing strategies for this "worst first" approach, some of the ideas it was considering early this year set off panic among the economic interests likely to be most affected.
Any assessment of risk priorities inevitably must focus on the OP and carbamate insecticides. Though in use for many years and comparatively low in cost, these two families include many of the most intensely toxic chemicals used on crops. They are widely used on foods that children eat a lot of, such as fruits and vegetables. All are toxic to the nervous system, and they all work by a common mechanism, inhibiting enzymes that play a vital role in the transmission of nerve signals. The risk of subtle adverse effects on the developing nervous system in children, which might show up later in life as learning difficulties or behavioral problems, is a central concern in setting safety standards for these insecticides. EPA made it clear shortly after the FQPA was passed that the OP and carbamate families would be among the first reassessed under the new safety standard.
Does that mean EPA must ban all OP and carbamate uses immediately? Of course not! Now, where's that wise old owl when we need her?
Call it typecasting, but Consumers Union will play the role of the owl in this morality tale. We say, "Poppycock! The sky isn't falling!"
In place of rumor, we need facts. Two essential truths should help restore balance to this public debate:
The rest of this report spells out in detail the facts supporting those two conclusions. Chapter 2 shows where the risk is in kids' diets, and which insecticide uses contribute most to overall risk. We examined nine fruit and vegetable crops that kids eat in substantial quantities (apples, peaches, pears, grapes, oranges, green beans, peas, potatoes and tomatoes). For each crop, we used pesticide residue data collected by USDA and FDA to determine the fraction with residues of each OP and carbamate insecticide. Using the frequency of detection of residues and the relative toxicity of the individual pesticidesóeven within the same family, different chemicals differ widely in how toxic they areówe identified 40 "high-risk" uses, those that make the largest contributions to kids' dietary exposure and risk.
Those "Worst 40" uses, combined, seem very likely to account for the lion's share of risk kids are exposed to from OP and carbamate residues in foods. The Worst 40 uses are thus a logical focus for EPA's initial application of the new FQPA safety standard. By eliminating or tightly restricting just these 40 uses (out of over 600 permitted uses for the OPs, and about 100 for the carbamates), EPA could swiftly achieve a large reduction in risk.
In Chapter 3, we identify alternatives that can be usedóin fact, are being used now by many growersóto manage the pest problems against which the Worst 40 OP and carbamate uses are weapons. Even the widely used OPs are typically applied to only small fractions of the acres of the treated crops in any given year. In 1996, according to USDA pesticide use data, 38 percent of vegetable acres were treated with one or more OPs; pests were managed without OP applications on 62 percent of the vegetable acreage. Figures for fruit acreage in 1995 are 44 percent treated with OPs, 56 percent not treated.
In short, more than half of fruit and vegetable acreage has been farmed without use of any OP insecticides in recent years. Instead, growers control insect pests with chemicals that pose lower risks of dietary exposure, with biopesticides, and with preventive practices that make up the systematic approach called Integrated Pest Management, or IPM for short (see Benbrook et al., 1996 for a detailed discussion of IPM). Because of declining efficacy, to protect farm workers' safety and in response to consumer demand for safer foods, use of the OPs has been declining for a decade or so in most crops. FQPA implementation will not turn agricultural pest control upside down; it will merely accelerate trends already being driven by other forces. And EPA's effort to reduce pesticide risks to children will not disrupt the food supply.
While good alternative pest control choices exist for most of the Worst 40 OP and carbamate uses, EPA can't simply wave a magic wandówhoops, wrong fairy taleóand make these high-risk pesticide uses disappear. It will require intensive collaboration involving the agency, the USDA, and affected parties to ensure that growers have the informationóand confidenceóneeded to apply available and emerging alternatives.
In a few cases, viable alternatives may not be widely accessible or adopted yet, and EPA may need to restrict, rather than ban, certain highly valuable insecticide uses. Typical restrictions should aim to prevent leaving any detectable residues in foodsóby requiring a longer interval between application and harvest, for example. EPA may also need to provide for "emergency" use of restricted chemicals, where crop loss is threatened. Appropriate safeguards need to be put in place to make sure emergency-use exemptions are invoked only if no other option is available, and not abused to keep otherwise banned chemicals in wide use.
America can have both a safer food supply and productive, increasingly sustainable agriculture. The goals are not mutually exclusive; they can even be mutually supportive. It is time to cut through the smog of politically inspired fear, get all the relevant facts on the table, and start making smart regulatory decisions that deliver on the promises of the FQPA.
