Bush Pesticide Plan Raises Concern for State Laws

President Bush will announce a seven-point package today intended to strengthen the nation’s laws and regulations involving the use of pesticides on food products, but environmental activists expressed alarm that the initiative could preempt more stringent state regulations.

The plan, which would require legislation to be submitted to Congress later this year, was hailed by Administration officials as a move to give regulatory agencies authority to move with more dispatch in dealing with food safety questions.

Although only a broad outline of the program was available Wednesday, environmental officials reacted hotly to a provision that is expected to prevent California and other states from adopting standards more restrictive than those contained in the proposed federal law.

“It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Rick Hind of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Similar criticism was voiced on Capitol Hill and by California environmentalists, who said that it appeared the package would do more to protect food producers than to protect food.

Administration officials declined to divulge details of the proposals, but the head of the Environmental Protection Agency hailed the initiative as a strong step toward speedy action in cases where the use of chemicals could endanger food safety.

The plan, EPA Administrator William K. Reilly said, “is responsive to a number of problems this agency has had in administering our pesticide law.”

Sources said the proposals would sharply reduce the time it takes the government to remove a potentially dangerous pesticide from the market and that it would allow the EPA to halt the use of agricultural chemicals thought to be hazardous.

But environmental groups had hoped the Administration would take a tougher stance.

In California, the revisions are likely to become an issue in the gubernatorial campaign.

“The heart of this proposal is to preempt the right of Californians to set food safety tolerances,” said Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who chairs the political and environmental coalition pushing a sweeping 1990 ballot proposition that would outlaw any known cancer-causing chemical in foods.

One of the chief authors of the proposition is California Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, who said Wednesday that any plan that would preempt the state’s ability to act on pesticides and food safety is “simply unacceptable.”

“This is a states’ rights issue,” Van de Kamp said. “If Californians want to ban cancer-causing pesticides, we should have that power.”

He called on members of the California congressional delegation to oppose the Administration proposals.

One member of the California delegation expected to challenge the Administration plan is Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health and the environment. Waxman has introduced his own bill, which is far more restrictive than the plan expected to be announced by the White House today, and he plans subcommittee hearings next month.

Spokesmen for Sen. Pete Wilson, a Republican who is running for governor, sharply criticized the move toward preemption of state authority.

“This is going to cause an uproar,” Wilson Press Secretary Bill Livingston said. In San Diego, Wilson spokesman Otto Bos said that if the Administration proposal weakens state authority, “Pete Wilson will oppose it as he always has.

“California has tougher laws on pesticides than the nation as a whole, and Pete has in the past voted against attempts to preempt the state laws with federal law,” Bos said.

Besides preventing the state from going beyond federal law, sources said that Bush’s proposal would provide for a weighing of cancer risk versus the perceived benefits of pesticide usage, a standard fiercely opposed by environmentalists. Just as the Exxon Valdez oil spill created a furor over offshore drilling, the use of the growth-enhancing chemical Alar on apples created nationwide concern about food safety earlier this year.

Although Alar is not a pesticide, public concern over its possible cancer risks eventually forced the chemical off the market. The scare passed rapidly, and the EPA’s Reilly has said that a rapid restoration of public confidence in apple supplies is evidence of the credibility of the environmental agency.

As the outlines of the Bush proposals began to circulate Wednesday, Al Meyerhoff, a senior attorney for the Environmental Resources Defense Fund in San Francisco, said the plan is “nothing more than putting a happy face on a program that is already bankrupt.”

“This will do nothing to prevent future Alars,” he said. “We will have sons of Alar for years to come.”

Staff writer Keith Love contributed to this story.