Consumers Union, a 60-year-old organization best known for testing everything from hair dryers to automobiles, this week jumped into a field farmers wrestle with almost daily: pest control.

The 288-page CU book Pest Management at the Crossroads was released Tuesday. It reports two years of work by a team headed by Charles Benbrook, a nationally known pesticide consultant.

Despite tightening regulations and outright cancellation of some materials, the risk of pesticide-caused illness remains about the same as it was in the early 1970s, Benbrook said.

"We were actually surprised to find that the levels have actually not gone down in general," he said by telephone from his office in Washington, D.C. "We broke the analysis up into insecticides, herbicides and fungicides and both acute and chronic risks."

The study found agricultural pesticide use peaked in the early 1980s, then decreased as more powerful materials lowered the amount needed to cover crops. However, toxicity per unit rose as application rates per acre shrank.

Recent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data show an upswing in agricultural fungicide use since 1990, driving up total chemical use on crops despite emerging disease-and insect-resistant transgenic plants.

"As reliance on pesticides has intensified, total use and risks have increased accordingly," the report concluded. It faults in part proprietary plants bioengineered to use a specific herbicide for week control, continuing the reliance on chemicals.

The way to reduce consumer risks, Benbrook said, is to increase integrated pest management, or IPM, strategies. Make IPM profitable for farmers, he said, change state and federal pesticide regulations to encourage new control methods and boost federal research dealing with applied IPM.

"Many farmers are doing a great job of moving along the IPM continuum," said Benbrook.

He faulted the 1993 IPM Initiative announced by President BIll Clinton as talk with little action. Reassigning priorities within the U.S. Department of Agriculture was denied in budget legislation.

USDA two years ago estimated that about half the nation's cultivated acreage is under some form of IPM. Benbrook doubts it, but doesn't quarrel with the USDA goal of having all farm and forest management part of IPM by 2020.

"Measuring IPM adoption and setting goals for progress in agriculture must be crop and region specific since soils, climate technology and pest pressure vary so greatly across the country," the report stated. "our collective goal should be accelerating progress along the IPM continuum..."

Benbrook said one bright spot from Congress on the pesticides front is the passage this summer of H.R. 1627, the Food Quality Protection Act. Benbrook's research team never expected the bill to emerge. It's been around in draft form for 12 years and as new law, it revises ways the government sets pesticide risk tolerances.

Consumers Union, based in Yonkers, NY, has from time to time reported on pesticide use, even though its monthly magazines and periodic buyer's guides mainly rate consumer goods.

Edward Groth, CU's environmental project director, stated in a forward to the new pesticides book that in 1993 the organization decided it needed a "big picture" look at pesticides from public health and environmental aspects.

Benbrook, author of two national pesticide studies and a review of the state of California regulatory system, was hired. The team included Groth, two other CU scientists and California activist Sandra Marquardt.