EPA Denies Grape Growers Use of Pesticide : Agriculture: Californians had sought the unregistered chemical to aid in ripening of crops. Fight focuses on rules in applying for exemptions.

Reversing itself for the second time, the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew its permission Friday for California grape growers to use an unregistered pesticide called hydrogen cyanamide to promote uniform ripening of their fruit.

The action came as a U.S. District judge prepared to consider a request for a temporary federal injunction against the chemical’s use and hours after the California EPA and the Arizona Department of Agriculture dropped their request for permission to spray it on their crops in the coming weeks.

For several years, the two state agencies have sought an emergency exemption from Section 18 of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act for hydrogen cyanamide, contending that grape crops were threatened by a warming climate and required the chemical to bring the fruit to a successful harvest.

Growers also maintain that they are at a major competitive disadvantage with grape growers in Mexico, who can use the chemical to enhance their yield.

Late last year, the EPA’s office of pesticide programs denied an exemption for the chemical in 1993, but administrator William K. Reilly reversed the action, giving the go-ahead for the chemical’s use. Reilly concluded that the chemical posed no hazard to health or the environment and that progress was being made toward getting it registered.

Two days ago, the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides filed suit, asking, among other things, for a federal restraining order against its application.

Both sides in the arcane debate acknowledge that the fight is not really about hydrogen cyanamide, but the way that the federal pesticide program is administered, specifically the guidelines used in granting such exemptions.

The chemical is not known to cause any significant adverse effects, but because it has not completed the requirements for registration it can be used only if a federal exemption is granted.

Seeing the prospect of a precedent-setting court order in the continuing dispute, James Wells, director of the California EPA office of pesticides and toxic substances, Friday consulted with officials in Arizona and both states notified the EPA that they were dropping their request for an exemption.

They were promptly notified that permission to use the chemical was canceled.

Opposing sides in the dispute saw Friday’s turn of events as an opportunity.

Jay Feldman, executive director of the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, said the group will continue to seek a court ruling that would preclude the issuance of an exemption in the manner of Reilly’s hydrogen cyanamide ruling.

But a spokesman for the Desert Grape Growers’ League took a pointedly different view.

The door has been opened to “revising guidelines which have disenfranchised many of the crops that are entitled to protection under the Section 18 program,” said Robert I. Schramm, the league’s Washington representative.

In practice, he said, guidelines for granting exemptions from the federal pesticide law are being used in a manner never anticipated by Congress.

“We welcome an opportunity to now get into the process and work on the guidelines,” he said. “This is in that sense an opportunity for growers.”

In its lawsuit, the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides maintained that the EPA reversed its refusal of an exemption as the result of political pressure from elected officials and the agricultural chemical industry.

It maintains that emergency permits have come to be routinely used to allow the use of unregistered pesticides.