Grape Growers Receive Go-Ahead on Pesticide : Agriculture: The EPA chief’s reversal of earlier decision draws angry response by environmentalists.

The chief of the Environmental Protection Agency has reversed a decision by the agency’s office of pesticide programs and permitted California grape growers to use an unregistered pesticide to promote uniform ripening of next spring’s crop.

The reversal by EPA Administrator William K. Reilly followed appeals of the earlier decision by California’s Department of Environmental Protection, the administration of Gov. Pete Wilson and the Desert Grape Growers’ League.

Word of Reilly’s action produced an angry response Thursday from environmentalists.

“The administrator’s action to circumvent the safety standards of the federal pesticide law in this instance characterizes the politicized decision-making that has plagued the EPA during the Reagan-Bush years,” said Jay Feldman, executive director of the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides. “This is another one of Reilly’s parting political gifts to the pesticide lobby.”

Reilly could not be reached for comment Thursday. But Linda Fisher, the agency’s assistant administrator for pesticides and toxic substances, said he had concluded that grape growers faced an economic emergency requiring use of the pesticide, hydrogen cyanamide.

She said that the agency is confident that neither health nor environmental damage would result from the decision.

Environmentalists object to the use of the pesticide largely because information about it is scarce. They note that written material supplied by manufacturers refers to its toxicity and recommends that it be handled with care.

A breakdown product of hydrogen cyanamide, called carbon disulfide, is lethal to birds. In California, farmers who use the pesticide are supposed to ensure they do not over-water and create puddles that would kill the birds that come to drink.

Grape growers in the Coachella and Cadiz valleys of California and Arizona have applied each year for more than a decade for a special exemption from federal pesticide laws that would permit them to use hydrogen cyanamide, which promotes uniform breaking of the grape buds and, consequently, more uniform ripening of the fruit.

The growers have argued that use of the chemical by grape growers in Mexico, places then at a distinct economic disadvantage.

For several years, beginning in 1988, the EPA has granted the exemption after being persuaded that the grape-growing regions were experiencing a warming trend that threatened grape production.

But on Nov. 24, the agency’s office of pesticide programs turned down the latest exemption request, saying the growers had not been able to show that a damaging warming trend would continue.

A month later, Douglas D. Campt, director of the office of pesticide programs, told California officials that the decision had been reversed and the exemption granted. “My original decision on this issue,” he explained, “has been revisited by the administrator.”

EPA’s ability to grant exemptions under special circumstances has been controversial for years, with critics contending that the power has been used to circumvent the normal regulatory process. Some exemptions have been granted for as much as 15 consecutive years. During the mid-1980s as many as 800 exemptions were granted annually by the agency, but the number has been reduced to about 300 in recent years.

Although Reilly’s reversal is unusual because it came late in the process, reversals of initial conclusions by the office of pesticide programs are not out of the ordinary, Fisher said.

Making such decisions, she said, is as much art as science, with officials called upon to make such judgments, year to year.

By the time the appeal reached Reilly, Fisher said, the administrator had the benefit of a detailed application, which had not made its way through the review process at the time of Campt’s decision.

On the basis of that application, she added, Reilly concluded that there was a potential economic emergency requiring the use of hydrogen cyanamide and that it would not pose a health or environmental hazard.

He also concluded that progress was being made toward getting the pesticide registered for use in the United States. Feldman insisted that nothing submitted by the state or by grape growers indicated an emergency situation.

“It is inappropriate and illegal,” he said, “to run pesticide registrations through the emergency registration program when an emergency does not exist. If it were legal, there would be no need for a pesticide registration program at all.”