A broken EPA pesticide office stands at a crossroads.
Nathan Donley and Karen McCormack for Environmental Health News
It's
really nasty stuff, a potent neurotoxin that pollutes groundwater, especially
in areas with highly permeable soils. People, particularly children, who drink
water or eat food contaminated by aldicarb are at significant risk of
developmental harm.
More
than a decade ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the
amount of aldicarb young children and infants could be exposed to in the U.S.
was already eight times greater than the amount known to cause harm. That means
the use of aldicarb had likely been poisoning young children for years.
After several years of negotiations, the EPA signed a voluntary agreement in 2010 with Bayer CropScience, then the sole maker of aldicarb, to phase out production and use of the pesticide by 2018.
The eight-year time frame of the
phaseout left much to be desired, but the uses that posed the greatest risk to
young children—on citrus and potatoes—were eliminated immediately. That made
aldicarb one of only a handful of pesticides that had been actively targeted
for phaseout by the EPA in the last 20 years.
But unfortunately, the troubling story of aldicarb use in the U.S. does not end there.
In April 2011, several months after Bayer CropScience agreed to completely phase out production of this pesticide, another pesticide company called AgLogic LLC secured approval from the EPA for the use of aldicarb on a subset of crops like cotton, sugar beets, and sweet potatoes in the U.S. And the EPA is now considering expanding that approval even further.
Earlier
this month AgLogic applied for approval of aldicarb on
oranges, grapefruit, lemons, and limes in Florida and Texas, altogether
accounting for about 400,000 acres of
crops.
The
EPA has not yet indicated whether it will approve this application. But it's
hard to overstate just how outrageous it is that the agency has not only turned
its back on its commitment to phasing out a pesticide with such well-documented
health risks but is actually considering expanding its use on the very crops
that pose the highest risk to people.
The
EPA's growing reputation across the globe as a pesticide pushover is
highlighted by the fact that aldicarb's makers are actually arguing that one
reason it would be "safe" to expand its use in the U.S. is because it
cannot be used virtually anywhere else in the world.
The
logic goes that since aldicarb is banned in most countries, it won't be found
in imported food. Therefore, people who eat or drink a mix of imported and
domestic foods will have their aldicarb exposure "diluted," so to
speak.
The
"It's banned everywhere else, so there's no harm in allowing its use
here" approach is as shocking as it is absurd. But you'd be mistaken to
think this type of argument will get the derision it deserves. The EPA has
already indicated a
willingness to revisit its cancellation of aldicarb based on this very
argument.
The
EPA's troubling decision to consider broader uses of aldicarb reflects a
well-documented trend in the agency.
For
example, the EPA is in the process of approving the
use of up to 650,000 pounds of the medically-important antibiotic streptomycin
as a pesticide on half a million acres of the same citrus trees that may be
treated with aldicarb and several other new and older pesticides. By contrast,
only 14,000 pounds of streptomycin's entire antibiotic class are used for human medicinal purposes
each year.
EPA's
reckless decision ignores the fact that streptomycin is not only
considered "critically important" for
human medicine by the World Health Organization, but is currently used to fight
another global pandemic that kills an
estimated one million people each year: tuberculosis.
The
wanton overuse of human medicines to treat bacterial diseases in plants is why
the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has raised concerns over
this impending approval and why the European Union, Brazil, and other nations
have banned its use on
plants entirely.
The
overuse of antibiotics like streptomycin, which are essential to treating human
disease, can threaten public health because it facilitates the growth of
bacteria that have developed resistance to these medicines.
The
EPA's careless approach to both aldicarb and streptomycin are symptoms of a
severely broken pesticide regulatory system in the U.S.—one that instead of
asking whether it should approve a dangerous pesticide, usually finds a way to
greenlight any product proposed by the pesticide industry.
It
is, of course, possible that a Biden Administration will step in and prevent
the broader approval of aldicarb or streptomycin from ever happening. But it's
also possible that, with dozens of other important environmental issues to
address, coupled with a CDC overwhelmed with the pandemic and an American
public conditioned to trust the EPA's judgment, that their approvals will just
slide right on through.
That
is the path of least resistance and business as usual in the EPA's pesticide
office.
That
deeply flawed regulatory process is why the U.S. allows the use of 85
pesticides, at a level of hundreds of millions of pounds each year, that have
been banned or are being phased out in the European Union, China, or Brazil,
according to a peer-reviewed study authored
last year.
It's
why, just in the last few years, the EPA approved more than
100 pesticide products containing ingredients widely considered to be the most
dangerous still in use, including some that were previously targeted for
phaseout in the U.S. This includes two products containing methyl bromide, a
potent ozone-depleting chemical that the U.S. committed to
phasing out 15 years ago under the Montreal Protocol.
It's
why just last fall the EPA approved several new toxic pesticides and proposed
the re-approval of dozens of older toxic pesticides—including atrazine,
paraquat, and multiple neonicotinoids, organophosphates, and carbamates that
are known to cause serious harm to people, wildlife, and the environment.
And
it's why the U.S. is widely considered by pesticide companies to be a dumping
ground for the world's worst poisons. If the EPA ignores aldicarb's
well-documented harm to humans and the environment and bows to the
pesticide-makers' request to greatly expand its use, it will further cement our
well-deserved reputation for putting pesticide company profits ahead of the
health of young children and imperiled wildlife.
But
before this story becomes a full reality, the Biden EPA should quickly step up
and demonstrate its commitment to returning the agency to the critical job its
title evokes: environmental protection.
A decision by the agency early in the new year to reject broader uses of aldicarb and streptomycin—and revisit many of the recent deplorable decisions made by EPA's pesticide program—would send an important message signaling that science, not the heavy-handed influence of agribusiness, will now drive all pesticide decisions moving forward.
Nathan
Donley, Ph.D. is a former cancer researcher who now works as a senior scientist
specializing in pesticide policy at the Center for Biological
Diversity. Karen McCormack, M.S. is a former pesticide researcher, policy
analyst, environmental fate scientist, and communications specialist at the
EPA.