August, 14 2019, 12:00am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
George Kimbrell; Center for Food Safety, gkimbrell@centerforfoodsafety.org
Nathan Donley; Center for Biological Diversity, ndonley@biologicaldiversity.org
Farmers, Conservationists Challenge Approval of Monsanto's Crop-damaging Dicamba Pesticide
WASHINGTON
Four public-interest organizations representing farmers and conservationists have made their legal case in a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Monsanto. The lawsuit, filed late Tuesday, challenges the approval of a pesticide that was designed to be sprayed on soybeans and cotton crops genetically engineered by Monsanto to tolerate being sprayed with dicamba.
Ignoring warnings of the potential for extensive damage to nearby crops from the drift-prone pesticide, the EPA first approved XtendiMax in late 2016. The groups sued the EPA in 2017, but in November 2018 the EPA renewed the pesticide's approval before the court could issue its verdict, requiring further litigation.
According to researchers who track crop damage, the first two seasons of XtendiMax use were an unprecedented disaster. Just as critics warned, dicamba sprayed on Monsanto's GE soybeans and cotton vaporized and drifted, resulting in damage to millions of acres of crops and wild plants.
"The evidence reveals that government officials -- rather than protecting farmers and the public interest -- have done whatever Monsanto has demanded to keep this pesticide on the market, forgoing the rigorous analysis and data that the law requires," said George Kimbrell, legal director of the Center for Food Safety and counsel in the case. "It's no wonder dicamba has had such devastating consequences: Its approval was illegal."
Across much of the country, dicamba drift was linked to damage to more than 4 million acres of soybeans, as well as scores of vegetable and fruit crops, trees and shrubs. Flowering plants near croplands have also suffered, potentially harming pollinators and hundreds of endangered animal and plant species.
Agronomists reported that they had never seen herbicide-related drift damage approaching this scale before XtendiMax's approval. As the 2019 season now unfolds, experts are already receiving similar reports of widespread crop damage.
"EPA ignored concerns of farmers, caving to Monsanto's pressure and rushing dicamba-resistant seeds to market," said Denise O'Brien, an Iowa farmer and board member of Pesticide Action Network. "EPA has failed utterly to protect farmers from this exploding crisis."
The groups' lawsuit details how the EPA was aware of the pesticide's potential to drift and damage nearby crops but, at the request of Monsanto, approved the pesticide without putting any measures in place to prevent those risks.
The legal papers filed show that when the EPA came under mounting pressure in late 2017, and again in late 2018, to take some action to address the drift problem, the agency adopted revised instructions for the pesticide's use proposed by Monsanto. The EPA ignored agronomists and state experts who correctly predicted the Monsanto-approved measures would not be effective in stopping the drift damage.
"The EPA's foolish approval of dicamba left a deep scar across millions of acres of farms and forests," said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. "The ill-advised rush to approve this dangerous drift-prone pesticide reflects just how far the EPA has strayed from its duty to protect Americans and wildlife from harmful toxins."
Beyond its failure to protect farmers, the EPA put hundreds of endangered species at greater risk. Despite the agency's own conclusion that the approval might harm an extraordinary number of protected birds, mammals and insects across dozens of states, the EPA refused to seek the guidance of the federal expert wildlife agencies, as the Endangered Species Act requires. Instead, the agency denied that there would be any risk and approved the pesticide without any measures to protect endangered plants and animals.
"The Trump EPA's reckless rush to appease Monsanto has pushed endangered whooping cranes, Karner blue butterflies, rusty patched bumblebees and hundreds of other species closer to extinction," said Stephanie Parent, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. "It's disgusting but hardly surprising that Trump's administration can disregard the law and the welfare of farmers and our most endangered plants and animals."
By 2018 the EPA was forced to acknowledge that dicamba was vaporizing and drifting away from the fields where it was applied. In response, the agency added a new buffer requirement around fields being sprayed with the pesticide to increase protection for some endangered plants. But even when instituting these measures, the EPA's political management overruled agency scientists and reduced the size of the buffer they had recommended from 443 feet to only 57 feet.
"Dicamba, an old generation toxic herbicide, was given new life as XtendiMax, due to the failure of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide. Dicamba is still toxic, still highly drift-prone and still damaging to non-target crops. Will the buffer strips on my organic farm be adequate protection from the more volatile drift-prone nature of dicamba? I should not be put in the position to find out," said Jim Goodman, a Wisconsin organic farmer who serves as board president of the National Family Farm Coalition. "In the eyes of EPA regulators, corporate profit is clearly more important than the health and livelihood of farmers and farm workers or damage to the environment."
The organizations bringing the lawsuit are National Family Farm Coalition, Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety, and Center for Biological Diversity, represented jointly by legal counsel from Center for Food Safety and the Center for Biological Diversity.
* * *
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.4 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
About CFS: Center for Food Safety's mission is to empower people, support farmers, and protect the earth from the harmful impacts of industrial agriculture. Through groundbreaking legal, scientific, and grassroots action, we protect and promote your right to safe food and the environment. Please join our more than 900,000 advocates across the country at www.centerforfoodsafety.org. Twitter: @CFSTrueFood, @CFS_Press
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
(520) 623-5252LATEST NEWS
'Bending the Knee' to Insurance Lobby, Biden Admin Delays Medicare Advantage Reforms
"Medicare Advantage providers whined for months that they simply couldn't survive without being able to rip off the government, so the government said 'you can rip us off for just a little longer,'" said one critic.
Apr 01, 2023
The Biden administration announced Friday that it will allow Medicare Advantage plans to continue overbilling the federal government in the short term after the insurance industry lobbied aggressively against proposed rule changes aimed at cracking down on fraud in the privately run program.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said it is still moving ahead with the changes despite industry pressure to drop or completely overhaul them.
But instead of implementing the reforms all at once, CMS outlined a plan to phase in the changes over a three-year period, a concession to large insurers that dominate the Medicare Advantage market—which is funded by the federal government.
"How Washington really works: Medicare Advantage providers whined for months that they simply couldn't survive without being able to rip off the government, so the government said 'you can rip us off for just a little longer,'" The American Prospect's David Dayen tweeted in response to the CMS announcement.
The changes involve tweaks to the Medicare Advantage risk-adjustment model, which determines how much the federal government pays insurers to cover patient care.
Medicare Advantage plans are notorious for piling on diagnoses to make patients appear sicker than they are to reap larger payments from the federal government. CMS estimates that overpayments to Medicare Advantage totaled $11.4 billion in fiscal year 2022, a sizeable drain on the Medicare trust fund.
"Nearly every large insurer in the program has settled or is facing a federal fraud lawsuit for such conduct," The New York Timesnoted Friday. "Evidence of the overpayments has been documented by academic studies, government watchdog reports, and plan audits."
Mark Miller, the executive vice president of healthcare for the philanthropy Arnold Ventures, expressed concern that the Biden administration's decision to phase the Medicare Advantage changes in over three years will "continue to reward those insurers with the most abusive practices over the next two years."
"We are disappointed to hear that reasonable changes targeting abuse and waste in Medicare Advantage will be phased in over three years rather than fully implemented immediately," said Miller. "The coding abuses by insurers in Medicare Advantage have led the independent Medicare commission (MedPAC), which was created to advise Congress, to call for a 'major overhaul' of Medicare Advantage policies."
\u201cDisappointing to see the Biden administration bending the knee to the insurance industry while they fleece seniors and taxpayers billions\u201d— James A. Williams (@James A. Williams) 1680295460
Medicare Advantage insurers have been fighting the Biden administration's proposed changes for months, running ads warning that the reforms would result in higher premiums and worse care for patients—claims that federal health officials adamantly rejected.
Axiosreported that the Better Medicare Alliance, a Medicare Advantage lobbying group, "has spent $13.5 million on advertising since the beginning of the year, targeting markets with competitive 2024 Senate races. Their ads painted the CMS proposal as a cut to Medicare that will eat into consumer benefits."
But Stacy Sanders, an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, told the Times last month that "we will not be deterred by industry hacks and deep-pocketed disinformation campaigns."
Becerra himself pushed back on social media, writing, "Leave it to deep-pocketed insurance companies and industry front groups to characterize this year's proposed increase in Medicare Advantage payments as a pay cut."
Biden administration officials sounded a different note on Friday. "We were really comfortable in our policies, but we always want to hear what stakeholders have to say," CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure told the Times, admitting that industry lobbying impacted the agency's decision to drag out its implementation of the changes.
CMS projected Friday that under the finalized rules, Medicare Advantage plans will see a payment increase of 3.32%—nearly $14 billion—in 2024 compared to this year.
The payment boost will come as Medicare Advantage insurers are facing growing scrutiny from progressive lawmakers over their business practices, including widespread overbilling, the use of artificial intelligence to cut off patient care, and denials of necessary care.
"Federal audits have found that taxpayers have been overpaying bad actors running Medicare Advantage plans by billions of dollars every year, threatening the stability of both Medicare Advantage and traditional Medicare," Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said earlier this week. "This fraud has to end."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who joined Merkley last week in criticizing the massive profits of Medicare Advantage insurers, tweeted Saturday that CMS is "making progress, but these delays are a step backward."
"For years, private Medicare insurers have been gouging taxpayers and denying care for seniors and people with disabilities," Warren wrote. "There is a lot more work to do to curb these abusive practices."
Keep ReadingShow Less
15 Million People Could Lose Coverage as Nightmarish Medicaid 'Purge' Begins
"I feel sick," said one physician. "Medicaid is not enough: we need seamless, lifelong universal care now."
Apr 01, 2023
Beginning on Saturday, states across the U.S. will start the process of stripping Medicaid coverage from millions of people as pandemic-related protections lapse, part of a broader unraveling of the safety net that was built to help families withstand the public health crisis and resulting economic turmoil.
Medicaid's continuous coverage requirements were enacted early in the Covid-19 pandemic to help vulnerable people maintain insurance amid the health emergency, resulting in record-high Medicaid enrollment.
But at the end of last year, congressional negotiators agreed on a bipartisan basis to set April 1 as the beginning of the "unwinding" process for the continuous coverage mandates, which prevented states from conducting regular eligibility screenings for Medicaid recipients.
The bipartisan deal gave states 12 months to determine who is still eligible for Medicaid, but some states—including Arkansas and South Dakota—are jumping at the opportunity to quickly remove people from the program. (State timelines for kicking off the unwinding process can be seen here.)
"Tonight at midnight some people in AZ, AR, ID, NH, and SD will lose their Medicaid coverage," Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Children and Families, tweeted Friday. "South Dakota is especially vexing as expansion kicks in July 1st. The state could structure their renewals to ensure that parents move seamlessly into expansion. But they are erroneously claiming federal rules mean they can't. Not true."
Residents of the 10 states that have refused lifesaving Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are likely to be hit hardest by the end of continuous coverage requirements, which the Biden administration estimates could result in 15 million people losing health insurance nationwide—including millions of children.
"Because those states tend to make only the extremely poor eligible for Medicaid, they will have many people who make too much to qualify for the government health insurance but not enough to reach the income needed to get federal subsidies to afford health plans sold on ACA marketplaces—the coverage the administration is counting on as the main fallback," The Washington Post's Amy Goldstein reported earlier this week.
"The toll will be large, too, in 13 states that have not chosen to extend Medicaid benefits to women for a full year after they give birth," Goldstein added. "Texas falls on both lists."
Because of the administrative barriers associated with income verification and other eligibility tests, many people are likely to lose Medicaid coverage even though they're still eligible for the program.
The Health and Human Services (HHS) Department has estimated that nearly 7 million people could be removed from Medicaid despite still being eligible due to "administrative churning."
The consequences of what one commentator has dubbed "The Great Medicaid Purge" could be disastrous, given the health impacts associated with insurance loss.
As HHS summarized in a recent report:
People who experience churning or coverage disruptions are more likely to delay care, receive less preventive care, refill prescriptions less often, and have more emergency department visits. One study found that unstable Medicaid coverage increased emergency department use, office visits, and hospitalizations between 10% and 36% and decreased use of prescription medications by 19%, compared to individuals with consistent Medicaid coverage. Children with interruptions in coverage also are more likely to have delayed care, unmet medical needs, and unfilled prescriptions.
"I feel sick," said Adam Gaffney, an ICU doctor at the Cambridge Health Alliance. "Some 15 million people will be purged from Medicaid, including 7 million who actually remain eligible for the program but fail to jump through the bureaucratic hoops! Medicaid is not enough: we need seamless, lifelong universal care now."
The Medicaid continuous coverage requirements are the latest pandemic-era protections to fall in recent months.
Starting on March 1, enhanced Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits were cut off in dozens of states, slashing food aid for tens of millions.
Additionally, the boosted Child Tax Credit (CTC) expired in late 2021 due to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and congressional Republicans, resulting in a rapid surge in child poverty. Shortly before the expanded CTC lapsed, boosted unemployment benefits that helped millions weather economic chaos ended.
As the pandemic-era safety net crumbles, congressional Republicans are looking to roll back Medicaid, SNAP, and other key programs even further with spending cuts and punitive work requirements.
"Republican calls to cut government funding put everything from child care to opioid treatment and mental health services to nutrition assistance at risk for millions," Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, warned earlier this week.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Amid Fears Over Russia-Belarus Nuke Deal, UN Official Calls for Talks to Ease Tensions
"The absence of dialogue and the erosion of the disarmament and arms control architecture, combined with dangerous rhetoric and veiled threats, are key drivers of this potentially existential risk."
Mar 31, 2023
The United Nations disarmament chief on Friday called for de-escalatory talks to curb the risk of nuclear war amid global concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin's plan to station so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Roughly 13 months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin announced what critics called the "extremely dangerous escalation" last weekend, as United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu noted at the beginning of her briefing to the U.N. Security Council—which Russia, a permanent member, is set to lead for a month starting on Saturday.
Nakamitsu's remarks came as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, in a speech to his country's Parliament, claimed without evidence that the United States and other Western nations plan to take over both Belarus and neighboring Poland, and vowed that "we will protect our sovereignty and independence by any means necessary."
"States must avoid taking any actions that could lead to escalation, mistake, or miscalculation."
Nakamitsu said that "the risk of a nuclear weapon being used is currently higher than at any time since the depths of the Cold War. The war in Ukraine represents the most acute example of that risk. The absence of dialogue and the erosion of the disarmament and arms control architecture, combined with dangerous rhetoric and veiled threats, are key drivers of this potentially existential risk."
"States must avoid taking any actions that could lead to escalation, mistake, or miscalculation," she continued. "They should return to dialogue to de-escalate tensions urgently and find ways to develop and implement transparency and confidence-building measures."
Putin justified the deployment plan in part by insisting that the weapons will remain under Russian control and pointing to the U.S. nukes that have been stationed in allied European countries for decades. The United States—which has the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal after Russia—is believed to have about 100 such bombs spread across Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
Both Russia and the United States are parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Nakamitsu stressed Friday that all parties to the treaty, whether or not they have nukes, "must strictly adhere to the commitments and obligations they have assumed under the treaty."
\u201cToday, High Representative @INakamitsu urged dialogue to reduce nuclear risk and de-escalate tensions during @UN Security Council briefing on the threat to international peace and security.\n\nRead \u25b6\ufe0f\u00a0https://t.co/iLA5M3miD7\u201d— ODA (@ODA) 1680279137
The issue of a state without its own weapons hosting some from one of the world's nine nuclear-armed nations "has existed for decades, across various regions and under different arrangements. These arrangements pre-date the NPT, with the exception of the recent announcement," Nakamitsu acknowledged. "The issue of so-called 'nuclear sharing' was debated intensely during the negotiation of the NPT" and "has been the subject of subsequent discussions."
After echoing U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres' call for Russia and the United States "to return to full implementation of the New START Treaty and commence negotiations on its successor," Nakamitsu said that "the accelerated implementation of commitments under the NPT can also contribute to undergirding international stability. I therefore appeal to all states parties of the NPT to fully adhere to their obligations to the treaty, and to immediately engage in serious efforts to reduce nuclear risk and de-escalate tensions."
Meanwhile, the U.S. and Russian ambassadors took aim at each other's countries during the U.N. Security Council meeting.
"We are pursuing cooperation with Belarus without violating obligations," argued Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian ambassador, highlighting the U.S. warheads across Europe. "We are not transferring nuclear weapons."
According toU.N. News:
Russia must take "all requisite measures" in response to "provocative steps," [Nebenzia] said, given the fraying global security architecture, dictated exclusively by Washington, along with London's recent decision to deploy armor-piercing ammunition to Ukraine.
"A nuclear war cannot be won," he said.
Russia's suggestion that this intended deployment is justified because of the use of armor-piercing ammunition supplied by Western forces, containing depleted uranium, is "ludicrous," U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood said.
"Armour-piercing ammunition is in no way analogous to tactical nuclear weapons," he said, adding that the Kremlin is attempting to limit and deter Ukraine's efforts to defend itself, and manipulate matters to win the war.
"Any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would have severe consequences and would fundamentally change the nature of this war," Wood added, urging Russia to reconsider its decision to deploy nukes in Belarus.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular
SUPPORT OUR WORK.
We are independent, non-profit, advertising-free and 100%
reader supported.
reader supported.