Pesticide Challenge for EPA

When Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act in 1996, the legislation was hailed for walking the middle ground between environmentalists who wanted a total ban on old, relatively toxic pesticides and farmers who said that would put them out of business.

The law requires the Environmental Protection Agency to reevaluate acceptable levels for pesticide residues on fruits, vegetables and other crops in considering a previously ignored factor: how pesticides affect children, whose brains and immune systems are particularly vulnerable to low-level chemical exposure. Unless pesticide manufacturers can present the EPA with animal studies indicating that a particular pesticide is safe for children, the law requires the EPA to increase its safety limits tenfold.

The EPA, however, has yet to implement most of the safety margins and the middle ground is fast disappearing. On Thursday, the agency fell into an intense cross fire sparked by the release of a Consumers Union study showing that residues of a particularly dangerous class of pesticides called organophosphates to be far higher than previously estimated. Environmentalists quickly called for a ban, while farm lobbies vowed to vigorously fight it. A third player, the chemical manufacturers, announced a $1.2-billion study of “health and environmental safeguards,” to be completed in 2004.

In a virtual admission of its failure to implement the law, the EPA last week began distributing millions of brochures to grocery stores, urging parents to “wash, scrub, peel and trim” fresh produce to remove pesticides. The brochures are available on the Internet at www.epa.gov/pesticides/food.

The EPA cannot ignore the law much longer, for the act requires the agency to establish within six months the safety of 3,000 uses of various pesticides or call for a tenfold reduction in their levels. The EPA needs to acknowledge its obvious inability to meet that mandate and then focus its limited resources on reducing the use of a handful of the most toxic chemicals.