Worst First:
High-Risk Insecticide Uses, Children's Foods and Safer Alternatives

Prepared by Consumers Union Washington, D.C.
September, 1998
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Table 1 presents data on insecticides used in the production of fruit and vegetables, as reported by the most recent chemical use surveys carried out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS).

The fruit and vegetable crops surveyed by NASS in 1996 and 1997 are shown in Table 2. Fruit data were collected in crop season 1997, vegetable data in 1996. There are two exceptions noted in a comment at the bottom of Table 2 -- the potato data are from 1997 and the strawberry data are from 1996.

Organophosphate active ingredients appear in "Bold" text, carbamates in "Italics." The first column reports each active ingredient's latest official Office of Pesticide Programs chronic Reference Dose. Exceptions are noted in the footnotes to the table. We assigned a "not less than 0.4 mg/kg" reference dose for chemicals that the EPA considers largely nontoxic. For such chemicals, EPA does not require as thorough toxicity testing and does not set a reference dose.

The values in Table 1 do not include any of the recently proposed changes in the 10-X safety factor, or Reference Doses as a result of ongoing toxicology evaluations triggered by the FQPA. While the EPA document "Hazard Assessment of the Organophosphates," dated July 7, 1998, suggests several changes in RfDs, these values are only the recommendation of one of many scientific committees assessing the need for changes in RfD values, and are not yet official.

The second column reports the "Number of Crop Uses" -- the number of fruit and vegetable crops on which USDA reports acre treatments and pounds applied in 1996-1997. NASS chemical use surveys do not cover all acreage of each crop. No use is reported in cases where the reported "Percent Acres Treated" is less than 1 percent of total planted or bearing acres. According, data in this column marginally understate the number of crop uses.

"Acre Treatments" are reported in the third column -- the number of acres of a given crop that were treated with one or more applications, multiplied by the average number of applications on those acres that were treated.

The last column reports "Pounds Applied" of each active ingredient on the 43 fruit and vegetable crops surveyed in 1996 and 1997.