Pesticide Battle Lines : Only Unanimity Is in Criticism of Law, EPA

The newspaper ad from one California supermarket chain promoted produce that had “No Detected Pesticide Residues.” Another advertised: “Apples Without Alar,” touting fruit that was free of a specific farm chemical that may cause cancer.

The full-page ads--by Irvine Ranch Markets of Orange County and Sacramento-based Raley’s Superstores--are just one sign of the growing public and private dissatisfaction with the government’s pesticide-regulation programs.

Throughout the country, giant food chains like Safeway and food processors like Welch’s Grape Juice Inc. no longer buy apples and grapes treated with Alar. The baby foods division of Heinz, USA, informed farmers that it will reject produce containing any traces of the two dozen pesticides that federal regulators suspect may pose long-term health risks.

‘Serious Health Hazard’

Food industry sources say these companies are reacting to public concerns about pesticide residues in the nation’s food supply. Annual polls by the Food Marketing Institute show that three out of four consumers believe pesticide residues to be a “serious health hazard.”

Pesticide regulation is the province of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. By law, EPA must register pesticides for farm use while making sure that these deadly chemicals do not pose “unacceptable risks” to workers, the environment or the nation’s consumers.

In recent years, reports of potentially dangerous pesticide residues in fresh produce, bake mixes and baby foods have prompted some state officials to bypass the slower-moving EPA and set their own safety limits, recalling contaminated products from supermarket shelves. California requires chemical companies to spend millions of dollars retesting chemicals that have already been registered by EPA.

“States simply do not believe the federal government program is credible,” said Jeff Nedelman, spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers Assn. He branded EPA “the Achilles’ heel of the food industry” and called for major changes in the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, the regulatory bible governing pesticide registration.

Actually, no one appears to be satisfied with the law or the way it is administered by EPA. For a decade, environmentalists and their allies have battled the chemical and food industries as each side attempted to get Congress to change the law.

“Neither side can pass its own agenda, but both sides can block the opposition,” Nedelman said. The result, he said, is “legislative gridlock.”

Legislation has been introduced in Congress again this year, but the prospects for breaking the gridlock are uncertain. The U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee last month agreed on a Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act bill that would speed up EPA’s flagging regulatory efforts by raising an added $126 million over the next decade. The money would come from increased pesticide registration fees to be paid by chemical companies.

But changing the law will not be easy. The problems are big, the subject is complex and confusing and the debate could be quite dull--if it did not deal with food and consumers.

Complicating the legislative processes are more aggressive roles being played by some states. The chemical companies--faced with California’s demand that they spend an estimated $200 million retesting the safety of pesticides already approved by federal regulators--want the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act amended to prevent individual states from setting up tougher testing standards. After vigorous debate, language was added to the Senate bill to preempt the states’ rights to require separate, more rigorous tests.

And the food industry wants to prevent states from establishing their own standards for the amount of pesticide residue that can be safely tolerated on fresh produce and processed food. EPA sets those tolerances, but states like Massachusetts and New York have been imposing their own residue safety limits.

“We want a uniform tolerance,” said Nedelman of the Grocery Manufacturers Assn. A marketing nightmare would be created if each state set its own pesticide tolerances, he said. The food industry is seeking an amendment to the bill to require uniform national tolerances set by EPA, he said.

On the other side, environmentalists, consumer groups and organized labor oppose any effort to preempt state authority on pesticide regulation. Critical of the cumbersome federal regulations, these groups want Congress to give EPA authority to quickly get rid of pesticides that scientists find are too dangerous.

A lot is at stake in the highly competitive pesticide industry. Gross sales last year hit $6.4 billion nationally. Farm use topped 1 billion pounds, up from just 200,000 pounds three decades ago, EPA reports show. Chemical companies spend as much as $80 million developing and testing a single new product, industry sources said.

However, getting a new product registered by the EPA is not the problem. The primary controversy focuses on thousands of older pesticides, like Alar, that were registered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture 15 years or more ago without knowing what impact they had on the environment or humans.

Alarmed by this shortcoming, Congress in the early 1970s turned pesticide regulation over to the EPA. It later ordered the agency to reassess these older chemicals to see if they were carcinogens or caused birth defects or other health problems. That task has proven to be a tough assignment. Since 1978 the agency has reviewed less than a third of the 600 older chemicals that have been used to formulate thousands of pesticides, EPA officials said.

As a result, “most of the 50,000 pesticide products registered for use today have not been fully tested or evaluated,” the General Accounting Office reported in 1986. Investigators from this congressional watchdog agency estimate that it will take EPA another decade to finish the task. Top EPA officials agree.

Alar, known by the chemical name daminozide, is one of these older pesticides. First registered in 1963, it came up for reassessment in 1984. The registration files on a chemical like this are supposed to contain the results of dozens of chemical, toxicological and environmental tests. Frequently, however, the database has gaps in it because the pesticide was never fully tested or the tests were never properly analyzed, experts say.

This was the case with Alar, a growth regulator that is classified as a pesticide under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. Alar is used to keep a dozen or more fruit and nut crops hanging on the trees or vines longer, giving the fruit more time to ripen and color.

The chemical, applied as a spray, is taken up systemically by the plants and permeates the fruit, giving it longer shelf life. Nearly a million pounds a year were being applied before the Alar controversy broke in 1985. Most of it was used on red apples.

Traces Remain

EPA experts said recent residue tests showed that once Alar was sprayed on a crop, traces of the pesticide and a breakdown product called UDMH (unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine) remained in virtually every sample, even after the fruit had been processed into applesauce, juices, cherry pie filling or peanut butter. Both Alar and UDMH are listed as “possible carcinogens” by EPA scientists, based on their reassessment of the test data.

Alarmed by the findings, agency administrators ordered the product’s registration canceled in 1985. This decision was reversed after chemical industry officials complained to the EPA Science Advisory Panel. The panel--made up of outside scientists--concluded the existing data was “inconclusive.” Agency officials backed away from the cancellation order on the condition that manufacturers conduct new toxicology tests.

That left supermarket officials in a quandary. A spokesman for the 1,500-store Safeway chain said EPA’s “confusion and uncertain position” led to the Oakland-based company’s decision not to market apples treated with Alar. In Cincinnati, a spokesman for Kroeger’s Stores agreed, saying the “simplest solution was just to stop selling apples treated with Alar.”

Health officials in Massachusetts set their own stringent Alar residue safety limits on both fresh apples and apple products. Such residue limits--called tolerances--are normally set by EPA, based on the data accumulated by exposing laboratory animals to Alar and extrapolating the results to determine how much can safely be consumed by humans.

Because critical data was missing from EPA’s registration files on Alar, Massachusetts officials said they could not rely on the 20 parts per million tolerance set by EPA. To be safe, state officials set a 1 ppm tolerance for adults foods and a “zero tolerance” for baby foods. Because of their smaller size, children are more vulnerable to the effects of pesticides.

“We felt that quicker, more effective actions could have been taken (by EPA),” said Nancy Ridley, director of the Massachusetts Division of Food and Drugs. “We found residues in fresh apples and processed apples. . . . Our concern was strongest for infant and baby foods.”

Alar Sales Plummet

The sale and use of Alar have plummeted as a result of the controversy, according to the manufacturers, Uniroyal Co. of Middlebury, Conn. “Sales are down 75%,” said Uniroyal spokeswoman Susan Szita Gore. She defended the product, saying there was no scientific evidence to support pulling Alar off the market.

The EPA will not make a final decision on Alar’s safety until the new round of toxicology tests is completed.

The Alar case, following the pesticide contamination of watermelons in California and the discovery of a potent carcinogen, ethylene dibromide, in cake and muffin mixes in recent years, raised questions among retailers about EPA’s ability to regulate pesticides.

No longer willing to trust government regulators to protect their customers from potentially dangerous pesticides, the managers of Raley’s and Irvine Ranch Markets set up residue-testing programs for Alar and 24 other suspected carcinogens. A private lab does the testing for them.

The move was controversial. While worried because government regulators are “not doing an adequate job,” Kroeger spokesman Paul Bernish said: “We disagree with Raley’s. We’re retailers . . . not regulators. . . . Testing for residues is the job of the state and federal governments.” But Kroeger, like Safeway and others, quietly informed apple growers that it would not buy their produce if they treated their orchards with Alar.

The safety standards set by EPA for the use of suspected carcinogens have recently been questioned by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. The council reported a year ago that EPA was allowing the “continued use of pesticides” that pose lifetime exposure risks of one cancer case in 10,000 population, a risk standard that the council said is too high. The council recommended a “negligible risk” standard of one case per 1 million people.

Tangle of Regulations

The tangle of regulations that allow farmers to use cancer-causing pesticides on food crops but prohibit the use of carcinogenic food additives like certain red dyes in processed foods is confusing, and the rules appear to be contradictory. The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act requires EPA to take a “risk-benefit” approach, weighing the laboratory evidence of cancer against the benefits the chemical offers agriculture. These evaluations are made on the basis of data extrapolated from toxicology tests on rats, mice and other laboratory animals.

Even when new testing reveals that the dangers of an old pesticide are greater than the farm benefits, EPA scientists and lawyers say that it takes them years to cancel the chemical’s registration because of the arcane, quasi-judicial procedures established by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act.

EPA critics point to California as one state with a better regulatory method.

An insecticide called chlordimeform is a case in point. Once widely used on fresh produce and cotton, chlordimeform was blocked by the state for use in California in 1986 after it was discovered that workers manufacturing the product in West Germany had unusually high rate of bladder cancers. Even after California refused to allow the product’s use here, EPA allowed sales to continue in other cotton states.

Charles Rock, a spokesman for Ciba-Geigy Co. of Switzerland, one of two companies making chlordimeform, said the product can be used safely if precautions are taken to protect the workers. He said the product was taken off the California market because the state’s tougher restrictions ran costs up. When federal regulators said they intended to adopt the California safety standards, the manufacturers announced they would stop production and sales after the current cotton season. Rock said continued sales would no longer be profitable and he criticized California’s tougher regulations.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture is the primary regulatory authority in the state. The department spends $42 million a year regulating the use of 600 million pounds of pesticides, half of what is applied in the nation. EPA spends $68 million on pesticide regulation and has a staff of 650. The state department has a staff of 340 scientists and regulators and pays for another 400 pesticide experts who work for individual counties.

EPA Database Questioned

EPA officials acknowledge that California frequently takes the lead in regulatory actions. Pressured by environmentalists and lawyers for farm workers, the state’s regulators four years ago began questioning the scientific database used by EPA to license and regulate pesticides. Alarmed by the “data gaps” investigators found in EPA’s files, they pushed tougher registration laws through the Legislature.

“This legislation was needed because . . . for 16 years EPA has been rolling over for industry. . . . The agency’s mind set is to protect the status quo,” said Ralph Lightstone, a California Rural Legal Assistance attorney who helped draft the bills. While Lightstone agrees that the California Department of Food and Agriculture “looks good by comparison (to EPA),” he argues that the agriculture department has been slow to enforce the new laws, a charge that California Department of Food and Agriculture officials angrily deny.

The most controversial of the new state laws--SB 950, the Birth Defect Prevention Act--requires the state to reassess all the scientific data supporting the registration of 200 chemicals used to formulate several thousand pesticides. EPA is also reassessing these chemicals. The state’s reevaluation raised questions about the validity of tests of 90 chemicals, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture has ordered the chemical companies to retest their products if they want to continue selling them in California.

“We estimate it will cost the chemical companies $200 million if all those tests are completed,” agriculture department Associate Director Rex Magee said. If a company does not do the study itself, the state will assess the cost to the company and order the study done. The tests must be completed within three years.

“California has gone far beyond what they needed to do. . . . What if other states come along and ask for more than California?” said Jack Early, president of the National Agricultural Chemical Assn. To prevent that, the industry supported the amendment to the Senate bill that cleared the Agriculture Committee in mid-April. The controversial language change would prevent states like California from going it alone on pesticide regulation.

“We don’t want to have to duplicate studies,” said Ralph Engel, president of Chemical Specialty Manufacturers Assn., an organization of home, garden and lawn pesticide manufacturers. The proposal would require all government agencies to agree ahead of time on test protocols and timetables so a single set of tests would satisfy everyone. Disagreements would be resolved by the EPA’s Science Advisory Panel, he said.

Called Unworkable

State and federal regulators said such a system would be unworkable.

“It (chemical industry amendment) is a disaster. . . . It’s an arrow aimed directly at the heart of . . . California’s birth defect bill,” Lightstone of the California Rural Legal Assistance said. “The chemical companies want to block the California program.”

The current federal bill is a bipartisan effort by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.). It must go through the Environment and Natural Resources Committee before it reaches the Senate floor, where environmentalists say they will fight the preemption issues.