Barely Off the Ground : Regulations Keep the Growing Number of ‘Natural’ Pesticides From Taking Off

When a Danish maker of safe, “natural” pesticides decided to open a research arm in the United States, it set up shop in this college town, a fertile center of new-age agricultural science.

But because of a regulatory posture that in some ways is as out-of-date as DDT, California will be the last place in the country where the environmentally friendly little microbes can be sold.

“We (will) just sell in all the other states first,” says Pamela Marrone, president of Entotech, a research subsidiary of pesticide maker Novo Nordisk.

This kind of anomaly is routine in the convoluted world of pesticide policy and regulation, in which more than 30 years of state and federal action have often perpetuated old problems and discouraged solutions.

While disputes rage on about just what danger is posed by pesticides and what to do about them, virtually all sides in the pesticide debate agree on one thing:

The nation’s effort to protect both the economic interests of farmers, along with the safety of the environment and the public, is hamstrung by contradictory policies, entrenched agribusiness interests and habits, bureaucratic gridlock and misplaced regulatory zeal.

“It makes you wonder if there’s hope for the human race,” says William Liebhardt, director of UC Davis’ Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.

Entotech’s naturally occurring bacteria are part of a fast-growing universe of biologically based pesticides that are widely accepted as safer than their petrochemical forebears.

But they still must be approved for farm use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which takes as long to deliberate over so-called bio-rational pesticides as it does the more toxic products.

Then, in the name of heightened public safety, California requires that many tests--some irrelevant to bio-rational pesticides--be duplicated and tougher measurements met, a process that can take an additional two years.

In the meantime, fruit and vegetable growers continue to spray old-fashioned chemical pesticides on their crops--toxic but legal products protected by the same regulatory inertia that stifles the improved technologies.

“They have to go through one idiotic mechanism at the EPA level, then they’ve got to go through another one here,” admits James W. Wells, director of California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation. “We’ve created a process and restrictions that don’t match the new technology.”

Progress--in the form of innovative efforts by farmers in California and elsewhere to wean themselves from their heavy reliance on chemical pesticides--seems to have been made despite government policy, rather than because of it.

There is anecdotal, but inconclusive, evidence that overall farm pesticide use has bottomed out in California and some other states. Some farmers, occasionally aided by the government but mainly in anticipation of ever tougher restrictions, have managed big reductions in chemical use through various techniques.

The Clinton Administration took official notice of the policy failures several weeks ago when three agencies responsible for safe food--the EPA, Food and Drug Administration and Agriculture Department--announced plans for regulatory reform and pledged to reduce the use of unsafe pesticides on the farm.

“It’s a course we embarked on a year and a half ago,” Wells says. He was referring to a state pesticide task force of farmers, pesticide makers, environmentalists and regulators that is trying to identify the regulatory obstacles to the spread of safer farming practices.

The White House initiative was triggered by a National Academy of Sciences report that said pesticide residues on food might pose a threat to children, whose vulnerability physically is not taken into account by government standards that set acceptable levels of residues.

But the government promised throughout the 1980s to make sense of pesticide policies and regulations, critics say, with little to show for it.

They describe a patchwork system that evolved from the early 20th Century, when the toxic pesticide of concern was arsenic. After the 1962 publication of “Silent Spring”--a book by author Rachel Carson warning about the dangers of pesticides--new laws were enacted and the regulatory apparatus grew to support them.

A generally parallel system, focused heavily on farm workers’ safety, developed in California. Here, some standards are higher and testing is stricter than at the EPA due to “a lack of trust” that the federal agency does an adequate job, Wells said.

Today’s laws require a short-staffed EPA to pass separate judgments on thousands of ingredients, for combatting each of hundreds of categories of pests, afflicting each of hundreds of kinds of crops, grown in each of dozens of climates, soils and surroundings.

Once the EPA gives its approval, pesticide companies must then separately get the blessing of California.

“In the case of safer technologies, this works in reverse of what the DPR wants to accomplish,” says Patrick Weddle, an independent pest control adviser in Northern California who sits on the state’s Pest Management Advisory Committee.

“Companies delay the California process until they get federal approval and start getting an income stream. . . . We want the whole thing turned around. We want to see the safer products first in California, not last.”

This pesticide-by-pesticide approach often does not accommodate technological advances toward safer pesticides, nor the advent of refined techniques known as integrated pest management, pesticide experts and environmentalists agree.

Integrated pest management uses lower levels of pesticides to “manage” pest populations rather than kill them entirely and favors pesticides that target specific pests. Old-line “broad-spectrum” chemical pesticides kill not only the unwanted pests but other creatures, including natural enemies.

Many of the newer biologically based products are designed for such narrower uses, notably a category of naturally occurring substances called pheromones, which interrupt the mating process between pests and keep their numbers below levels that create crop damage. But it takes as long to get approval of pheromones as it does conventional pesticides.

“Regulating products, rather than the safe use of products in the context of a . . . pest management system, is obsolete,” says Charles Benbrook, a Washington scientist who originally directed the well-publicized NAS report on pesticides and children.

Meanwhile, California, though it has by far the nation’s most comprehensive state program for regulating pesticides, stumbles on additional counts, according to a new analysis of the state’s pesticide efforts by Benbrook.

Because each of California’s more than 200 small-acreage crops requires its own certification for each pesticide and pest at state and federal levels, many pesticide makers are throwing in the towel rather than going through the costly and time-consuming process of seeking approval.

The payoffs are higher and the hurdles lower for such Midwestern field crops as corn and soybeans, whose high acreage means more pesticide sales. Pesticide makers have devoted their research and bureaucratic efforts to those ends.

So, while few new products are being approved and older ones have dropped out, growers have been left with about 19,200 pesticides to choose from--versus 45,000 just three years ago.

This might sound good, but it’s bad, Benbrook says.

To combat infestations and protect their livelihood, farmers are using more of the pesticides that are left to them, causing pests to build up genetic resistance--and triggering still greater applications of chemicals in a futile escalation of the pest war.

Meanwhile, the extra time and cost of satisfying California’s laws and regulations have tended to put the state’s crops out of reach for small biotechnology firms doing some of the most innovative work in developing new, safer pesticides.

Benbrook urged California to cut by a half or more the delay between a pesticide’s approval by the EPA and its clearance here. He also said the state should quit duplicating so many federal tests.

Legislation by Assemblyman Rusty Areias (D-San Jose) to allow temporary use of safer pesticides in California as soon as they receive EPA approval has already cleared the state Assembly. Backed by farmers, pesticide makers and others, it would still require the pesticides to go through the state’s regulatory system.

But it is opposed by environmentalists who consider it a lowering of the barriers to pesticide use. Groups such as the National Resources Defense Council instead want to ban about 30 specific pesticides and mandate a percentage reduction in overall pesticide use by the year 2000.