EPA Limits 2 Pesticides, Citing Children’s Safety

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday restricted the use of two popular pesticides in an effort to protect children and other consumers from toxic chemicals used on crops.

The agency’s announcement, its first action in a 10-year process, banned the use of methyl parathion on all fruits and many vegetables and limited the quantity of azinphos methyl that can be used on foods common in children’s diets, like apples, peaches and pears.

The newly restricted compounds and some three dozen other “organophosphates,” which account for about half the pesticides used in the United States, kill plant-eating insects by interfering with their nervous systems. Residue from the pesticides has the potential to disrupt brain development in children, studies have shown.

A key element of the science of assessing the safety of pesticides and other potentially toxic compounds is determining the levels at which they become dangerous. Monday’s action marked the first time that the EPA has judged the relative safety of pesticides according to their impact on children.

“By setting standards based on our children, this administration is ensuring a healthier diet for everyone,” EPA Administrator Carol Browner said at a news conference.

Browner stressed that the American food supply is safe and that parents should not worry about serving fresh produce to their children. She said that the new restrictions will provide an “extra measure of protection for children,” as required by the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act.

Congress unanimously passed that law in response to heightened awareness and concern over the impact of pesticides on children. A 1993 report by the National Academy of Sciences had concluded that fetuses, infants and children are more susceptible than adults to toxic pesticides because their internal organs are still developing and their enzymatic, metabolic and immune systems may provide less natural protection than those of older people.

The 1996 law called on the EPA to consider the cumulative exposures that children may have to pesticides--not only from the food they eat but from residential insect sprays and drinking water--when considering whether a pesticide poses a “reasonable certainty” of no harm.

Americans use more than 1 billion pounds of pesticides each year to combat pests on farm crops and in homes, schools, parks, hospitals and other public places.

Despite universal concern for the health of children, the law itself was the product of a long battle between farmers and pesticide manufacturers on one side and environmental and consumer groups on the other. That battle has continued to rage throughout the regulatory process and on Monday it showed no signs of easing.

The new restrictions drew harsh criticism--and competing lawsuits--from several sides. Farmers and the pesticide industry grumbled that the EPA review does not meet scientific standards and environmentalists and consumer groups complained that the EPA has moved too slowly, leaving too many potentially harmful pesticides on the market.

In April, all seven environmental and consumer groups on the government’s 52-member advisory panel on the issue resigned in protest. The groups, which included representatives of farm workers exposed to pesticides, charged that the Clinton administration had yielded to lobbying from the agriculture and chemical industries.

California farmers said that the rules announced Monday will not cause them immediate hardship but that restrictions on additional pesticides, expected within the next 18 months, could threaten their livelihoods, forcing them to rely on costlier pesticides that provide less protection for their crops.

The EPA has pledged to finish its review of all organophosphates by the end of next year.

Rick Schellenberg, who farms 250 acres of fruit trees in Reedley, Calif., said that he decided in April to convert to natural farming methods and end his use of methyl parathion. To get rid of Oriental fruit moths in his orchards, he hung strips and sprayed moth pheromones that would prevent the insects from mating.

A month and a half later, with about a third of several varieties of peaches and nectarines infested by worms, he was forced to spray his fields with the organophosphate pesticide product Imidan, he said Monday.

“If I wouldn’t have done it, I would have lost that whole crop,” he said.

Schellenberg, echoing many toxicologists, said he believes that the EPA’s methods for assessing the risk from these pesticides is flawed.

Browner said that Monday’s announcement fulfilled the first deadline Congress set for the EPA in the 1996 act, which directed the agency to review 9,700 “tolerances”--legal limits for pesticides--within 10 years.

Congress ordered the agency to complete by today the reassessment of 3,200 tolerances for pesticides that pose the greatest risks to public health.

But environmental groups charged Monday that EPA has failed miserably because many of the pesticides that it counted in the first wave were obsolete or used only minimally and thus had almost no impact on food safety.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), one of the authors of the law, agreed that the EPA has accomplished little in three years. “The law requires more but this is at least a small step in the right direction,” he said Monday.

Some consumer and environmental groups complained that the agency has failed to rule on the vast majority of current uses of the 228 pesticides it identified as posing the highest risks.

“This performance is unacceptable,” said Dr. Edward Groth of Consumers Union.

As the review process continues, however, and the EPA restricts the use of other pesticides, produce prices likely will increase, according to some California growers.

“If you go to the store and look at an organic peach and a conventionally grown peach, there’s a tremendous difference in prices,” said Jonathan Field, manager of the California Tree Fruit Agreement. “Anything that decreases yields has an impact on prices.”

The National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, and a coalition of California groups, including the United Farmworkers, plan to file a lawsuit in San Francisco today charging the EPA with failing to meet congressionally mandated deadlines for protecting children and others from high-risk pesticides.

“There is ample evidence that infants and children are being exposed to unacceptable levels of pesticides, even according to EPA’s own calculations,” said Jacqueline Hamilton, an attorney for the council.

But growers and the agriculture industry also blasted the EPA, saying that the review process has been accelerated and that it has relied on insufficient data.

“Decisions by deadline, not sound scientific data, damage farmers because they lose valuable tools unnecessarily,” said Jay Vroom, president of the American Crop Protection Assn., a trade group that represents manufacturers, formulators and distributors of pesticides. “Consumers lose, too, because decisions like this may shake their confidence in the safety of our food supply.”

The American Farm Bureau Federation, the crop protection association and other agriculture groups sued the government two months ago, charging that the EPA had failed to collect reliable data.

Times staff writer Melinda Fulmer contributed to this story from Los Angeles.