Pesticide Politics

For the most part, President Bush’s plan to tighten controls over pesticides that are used on or around food crops would be an improvement. But the plan also would give ground on two important aspects of existing law, changes that probably would be unwise and certainly are unnecessary.

In last week’s briefings on the bill, which is still being drafted, the President and officials of the federal Environmental Protection Agency said that they want to cut the time it takes to get a dangerous pesticide off the market and out of fields and orchards by about half. The legislation also would improve procedures for registering chemicals and assessing the risk of using them, and stiffen penalties for violating pesticide regulations.

One of two questionable features of the plan would change the formula by which EPA decides whether exposure to pesticide residue on food is so small that there is “negligible risk” of its causing cancer in a consumer. At present, the risk is considered negligible if there is a 1-in-a-million chance that the chemical will cause cancer.

The President’s plan would allow the EPA to set the “negligible risk” level as high as 1 in 100,000. EPA Administrator William K. Reilly said in briefings last week that the 1-in-a-million standard would continue to apply in most cases and it was not clear what factors the EPA would use in settling for the higher risk. Assessing risk is a subjective art rather than an objective science, so common sense says the low risk assessment is the right one when there is doubt about the data.

The other proposal under attack would repeal the right of states to apply tougher pesticide controls to food products and turn standard-setting over to the federal environmental agency. The risk-assessment problem probably can be negotiated. Cutting the states, particularly California, out of writing pesticide law cannot be, particularly with the history of state laws as inspiration for tougher federal laws and regulations.

The EPA’s argument for uniformity stresses the difficulty of growing crops under a lower standard in one state and trying to sell the food in a state where higher standards prevail.

At the same time, though, the agency says uniformity of law already is about as high as it can get; even California goes along with federal standards virtually all of the time. One agency official said that “we actually didn’t have a lot of problems with the way the law is now.” The strongest case for uniform pesticide regulation is made by food distributors and processors. One industry spokesman downplayed the importance of the proposal by saying that only a couple of dozen of the 300 pesticides used on food would be affected.

That is not a compelling argument against California’s right to decide what protections its citizens need. The state should not budge.