Like a tornado, the Food Quality Protection Act whirled through Congress in just a week, in the aftermath, American farmers are beginning to realize that when it comes to pesticide regulation they are not in Kansas anymore.
The storm began brewing six months ago, when the National Academy of Sciences published a landmark study concluding that "based on existing exposure data, synthetic chemicals in the diet appear to be present at levels...so low that they are unlikely to pose an appreciable cancer risk," In other words, with regard to pesticides, our food is safe.
Apparently choosing to ignore the scientific reality about pesticides, on July 17 the House Commerce Committee came to agreement on the contentious issue of pesticide regulation. Republicans and Democrats decided to compromise to produce legislation before the August recess. Within five working days a bipartisan bill, sponsored by Commerce Committee Chairman Thomas Bliley (r., Va.) was on the House floor; it passed 417-0. The very next day, in a historic display of dispatch, the Senate Agriculture Committee considered and passed the bill unanimously; that evening the full Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent.
Yet despite the National Academy of Sciences findings that pesticides pose virtually no health threat, the new law will make it more difficult to register and use pesticides. Welcome to the land of Oz.
To understand how the new law will affect pesticide use, it helps to understand how the old law worked. Under the old system the EPA determined a theoretically acceptable daily intake for each pesticide. In determining this acceptable level, the agency routinely considered several safety factors, which together pushed the accepted level so low that the risks of pesticide residues were negligible.
After setting the acceptable level, the EPA then calculated a theoretical maximum residue contribution: The agency assumed that the pesticide was sprayed on all a farmer's acreage at full strength for all the crops that he might use it on. The theoretical pesticide resides on all these crops were then tallied, greatly overestimating the amount of residue on the food.
If this total residue calculation was less the EPA's acceptable daily intake level, which was also designed to be excessively safe, the pesticide was approved. Once a pesticide had been approved, the agency granted a tolerance level for every crop on which the pesticide could be used.
There was an additional twist to the old pesticide system that caused a great deal of grief: the Delaney Clause of the 1954 Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act. This said that if a chemical causes cancer in laboratory animals, it couldn't be added to processed foods. Due to a quirk in the law, this provision applied to pesticides, even if the pesticide concentration remained below the EPA's tolerance level. Because of the Delaney Clause, the EPA was about to prohibit 80 uses of a number of pesticides. Although the Food Quality Protection Act gets rid of the Delaney Clause, the new law will force the EPA to lower its acceptable daily intake levels. It requires the agency to include a new safety factor for children and include the cumulative effects of pesticides that have a common mechanism of toxicity. This new common-mechanism factor is going to be an especially big problem for two of the largest pesticides groups, the organophosphates and carbamates, which include some of the most commonly used insecticides. For example, nearly 70% of the insecticides used to produce Washington apple would be affected.
According to one analysis, the new law will decrease tolerances on these classes of pesticides by a factor of 10 or more. In order to keep their products registered, the manufacturers will have to figure out a way to reduce their residue calculation, which means canceling usage. Manufacturers will drop uses with high dietary exposure and low acreage, mostly fruits and vegetables.
"The bill is going to force a sort of triage among the pesticide manufacturers, who must choose which tolerances and uses to keep, and which to abandon," says Charles Benbrook, former executive director of the National Research Council Board on Agriculture. This triage process, of course will only increase the cost of food- food that is already perfectly safe.
But lower tolerances aren't the only surprises in the new law. The Food Quality Protection Act has opened a couple other Pandora's boxes. The law's new criteria require the EPA to consider whether a pesticide may produce "endocrine effects." This provision provides the agency with a vast new arena in which to require new tests and regulations: anything that mimics hormones or influences their production. Like the EPA's cancer-risk assessment, an endocrine-risk assessment could lower tolerance levels even further.
However, the most potentially dangerous aspect of the law is the new safety standard. Under the old system, the agency established tolerances "to the extent necessary to protect the public health." Under the new law, the agency must "determine that the tolerance is safe"; "safe" is defined as "reasonable certainty of [causing] no harm."
The disturbing implication of this language is that modern science and technology have become increasing proficient at measuring astronomically small risks, including those associated with pesticide residue. In fact, the EPA's current risk assessment is designed to do just that.
The problem comes in interpreting the phrase "no harm." On their face, those words mean "zero harm," a short step from "zero risk." If the agency were ever forced to interpret the statute literally, it would have to set tolerances for all pesticides at zero. Given the proclivity of environmental groups to sue the EPA and advance their agendas, the chances are very good that sooner or later a judge will be deciding that very issue. And if the Food Quality Protection Act were interpreted literally, the law would tighten, just as environmental lawsuits forced the EPA to enforce the Delaney Clause ever more rigorously.
For now, the EPA seems content to lower dramatically the pesticide tolerance levels which may end up canceling more pesticide uses than the Delaney Clause did. In the long run the Food Quality Protection Act will likely create more problems for pesticide manufacturers, food processors and farmers-and ultimately, consumers-than it solved.
