House Panel Backs Revised Rules for Pesticide in Food

The House Commerce Committee approved legislation to overhaul pesticide safety standards for American foods, imposing tough requirements on all forms of edibles but weakening the power of states to establish even stricter limits.

Supporters, including such disparate forces as influential environmental groups and food processors, said the legislation would set standards for a much wider range of foods.

In particular, they said, the measure would set a standard for pesticides permitted on raw food and in processed food that is equal to the amount that would cause cancer in one person out of 1 million, defined as “a reasonable certainty of no harm.”

The restrictions also would set standards for pesticides based on the tolerance of infants and children, which is considerably lower than the tolerance of adults.

“For all pesticides, you’ll see legal levels come down 10- to 100-fold, and the law requires the Environmental Protection Agency to assess whether all of these levels of pesticides are safe for kids,” said Richard Wiles, vice president for research of the Environmental Working Group and a frequent critic of what he sees as lax treatment of chemicals in water and food supplies.

The compromise legislation was written by Commerce Committee Chairman Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.) and Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles). Expected to win full House approval easily, it would overhaul a law put in place in 1958 to govern the use of carcinogenic pesticides, fungicides and additives.

The House may act on the bill as early as next week, when a Senate committee also is scheduled to take up the measure.

One provision that has drawn fire from critics would forbid states in most cases to enact food safety regulations that are more restrictive than those of the federal government. That provision is potentially sensitive in California, which has a long history of setting some of the toughest food regulations in the nation.

Mary Raftery, legislative director of the California Public Interest Research Group, said that the legislation would “handcuff states’ ability to protect public health.”

Supporters, however, hailed the overall thrust of the bill. Vice President Al Gore said in a written statement that the panel “took a major step toward improving food safety for all Americans by strengthening our laws regulating pesticides in foods.”

Indeed, proponents stressed that although the legislation steps back from the total prohibition on pesticides in processed foods under the 1958 law, it would replace what EPA Administrator Carol Browner called “a fragmented system” with a standard that would be applied across the board to all foods, including fresh produce, and not just to the processed food in cans, frozen packages and bread wrappers.

Waxman said in an interview that “we set up one standard that applies to all food,” from raw apples and applesauce to milk and American cheese to grapes and processed raisins.

Such industry representatives as the Grocery Manufacturers of America and the National Food Processors Assn. had been pressing Congress for more than a decade to rewrite the 1958 legislation, known as the Delaney Clause.

But their movement gained political impetus only after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in 1993 that the clause was being interpreted too loosely and that the government must uphold its absolute ban on cancer-causing substances in processed food.