May, 06 2024, 12:44pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Bill Freese, Center for Food Safety, bfreese@centerforfoodsafety.org
Nathan Donley, Center for Biological Diversity, ndonley@biologicaldiversity.org
George Kimbrell, Center for Food Safety, gkimbrell@centerforfoodsafety.org
Bayer Seeks Reapproval of Pesticide That Federal Courts Have Twice Banned for Causing Widespread Damage to Crops and Communities
No New Dicamba Approval for 2024 Season, 2025 in Doubt
Pesticide-maker Bayer has asked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to re-approve the dangerous pesticide dicamba for use on genetically engineered (GE) cotton and soybeans.
The request comes after two different federal courts vacated the registrations of the drift-prone weedkiller — one in 2020 and the other in February 2024. Dicamba drift has damaged millions of acres, including croplands, home gardens, forests, and even wildlife refuges. Notably, neither EPA nor dicamba registrants appealed the 2024 court decision, which is now final. In an "existing stocks" order, EPA prohibited any sale or distribution of dicamba not already in channels of trade as of February 6th of this year.
Due to a 17-month review of this new application, dicamba use on GE soybeans and cotton may well remain prohibited for the 2025 crop season.
Overall, the proposal is similar to the prior approvals that the courts have twice found to be illegal, with applications still allowed in conditions that favor volatility and widespread damage to crops and the environment. However, unlike the unlawful 2020 approval, for this proposal there will be a notice and comment period, now required by the 2024 court's decision, in which stakeholders can weigh in and tell EPA to reject it.
"EPA has had seven long years of massive drift damage to learn that dicamba cannot be used safely with GE dicamba-resistant crops," said Bill Freese, science director at Center for Food Safety. "Nothing Bayer might say or do can redeem this inherently hazardous GE crop system. EPA must deny this application to spare thousands of farmers further massive losses, and to avert still more rural strife between dicamba users and victims of its rampant drift."
"This is a farce. Virtually nothing in this application addresses the concerns the public and the courts have about this destructive pesticide," said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "Bayer's cynical attempt to push through another illegal dicamba approval is obviously terrible for the environment, but it's also bad for farmers, who keep getting jerked around by the promise of another registration that's destined for failure. The EPA should stop this once and for all with a quick, decisive denial."
Bayer has offered some changes in the proposed label language, but these changes would not fix the key issues that have resulted in past calamities. Cotton growers would still be allowed to spray into the heat of summer (until July 30th), when volatility is worst, promising continued massive drift injury wherever cotton is grown. The proposed reductions in the number and amount of annual applications will not have much impact, since growers have historically used far less dicamba than permitted, causing enormous damage nonetheless. While the proposed label for soybeans would bar application after June 12th or crop emergence (whichever comes first), that language is likely to have little practical impact with a GE crop expressly designed for over-the-top use and the potential for spraying into June.
Background
In 2016 Monsanto, which has since been acquired by Bayer, opened the floodgates to massive spraying of dicamba by genetically engineering soybeans and cotton to withstand "over-the-top" spraying of the pesticide. The results have been devastating, with drift damage to millions of acres of non-genetically engineered soybeans as well as to orchards, gardens, trees and other plants on a scale unprecedented in the history of U.S. agriculture.
Dozens of imperiled species, including pollinators like monarch butterflies and rusty patched bumblebees, are also threatened by the pesticide.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that up to 15 million acres of soybeans have been damaged by dicamba drift. Beekeepers in multiple states have reported sharp drops in honey production due to dicamba drift suppressing the flowering plants their bees need for sustenance.
The pesticide industry encouraged widespread use of the older, more toxic dicamba after over-the-top use of the glyphosate-based product Roundup on crops genetically altered to resist it fueled weed resistance to glyphosate on more than 100 million acres of U.S. cropland.
In 2020 a federal court vacated the EPA's dicamba registration for the first time because of the unprecedented damage the pesticide caused. The court noted that in approving dicamba, the EPA had failed to examine how "dicamba use would tear the social fabric of farming communities." But a mere four months later, the EPA reapproved the pesticide, claiming that new measures would cut down on the damage.
Yet the EPA admitted in a 2021 report that its application restrictions to limit dicamba's harm had failed and the pesticide was continuing to cause massive drift damage to crops.
In February 2024 a federal court vacated the EPA's 2020 re-approval of dicamba. In its decision, the court outlined the massive damage to stakeholders who were deprived of their opportunity to comment. These included growers who do not use over-the-top dicamba and have suffered significant financial losses and states that repeatedly reported landscape-level damage. As a result, the court found "the EPA is unlikely to issue the same registrations" again after taking these stakeholders' concerns into account.
The court also criticized the EPA's assessment of the 2020 registrations' widespread harms. Monsanto and the EPA claimed this over-the-top new use of dicamba would not cause harm because of new restrictions on its use. But the court found the EPA's "circular approach to assessing risk, hinging on its high confidence that control measures will all but eliminate offsite movement, [led] to its corresponding failure to assess costs from offsite movement." And instead, just as independent researchers had warned, the restrictions failed and dicamba continued to vaporize and drift.
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. CFS's successful legal cases collectively represent a landmark body of case law on food and agricultural issues.
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Rights Advocates Demand Probe Into Reports That Israel Uses WhatsApp to Target Palestinians
"The Israeli Lavender system, supported by artificial intelligence, identifies Palestinians by tracking their communications via WhatsApp or the groups they join," said a Palestinian digital rights group.
May 18, 2024
The Palestinian digital rights group Sada Social on Saturday called for an investigation into Israel's alleged use of WhatsApp user data to target Palestinians with its AI system, Lavender.
The group, which is affiliated with the Al Jazeera Media Institute and Access Now, accused Meta, which owns WhatsApp, of fueling "the 'Lavender' artificial intelligence system used by the Israeli military to kill Palestinian individuals within the Gaza enclave."
As Common Dreamsreported in April, the Israel Defense Forces has relied on AI systems including Lavender to target people Israel believes to be Hamas members.
At +972 Magazine, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham wrote that a current commander of an elite Israeli intelligence unit pushed for the use of AI to choose targets in Gaza. The commander wrote in a guide book to create the system that "hundreds and thousands" of features can be used to select targets, "such as being in a WhatsApp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently."
Sada Social asserted that it had found the Lavender system uses WhatsApp data to select targets.
"The reports monitored by the Sada Social Center indicate that one of the inputs to the 'Lavender' system relies on data collected from WhatsApp groups containing names of Palestinians or activists who are wanted by 'Israel,'" said the group in a press release. "The Israeli Lavender system, supported by artificial intelligence, identifies Palestinians by tracking their communications via WhatsApp or the groups they join."
The mention of Israel's use of WhatsApp data in Abraham's reporting also caught the attention last month of Paul Biggar, founder of Tech for Palestine.
"There's a lot wrong with this—I'm in plenty of WhatsApp groups with strangers, neighbors, and in the carnage in Gaza you bet people are making groups to connect," wrote Biggar. "But the part I want to focus on is whether they get this information from Meta. Meta has been promoting WhatsApp as a 'private' social network, including 'end-to-end' encryption of messages."
"Providing this data as input for Lavender undermines their claim that WhatsApp is a private messaging app," he wrote. "It is beyond obscene and makes Meta complicit in Israel's killings of 'pre-crime' targets and their families, in violation of international humanitarian law and Meta's publicly stated commitment to human rights. No social network should be providing this sort of information about its users to countries engaging in 'pre-crime.'"
Others have pointed out that Israel may have acquired WhatsApp data through means other than a leak by Meta.
Journalist Marc Owen Jones said the question of "Meta's potential role in this is important," but noted that informants, captured devices, and spyware could be used by Israel to gain Palestinian users' WhatsApp data.
Bahraini activist Esra'a Al Shafei, founder of Majal.org, told the Middle East Monitor that the reports that WhatsApp user data has been used by the IDF's AI machine demonstrate why privacy advocates warn against the collection and storage of metadata, "particularly for apps like WhatsApp, which falsely advertise their product as fully private."
"Even though WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, and claims to not have any backdoors to any government, the metadata alone is sufficient to expose detailed information about users, especially if the user's phone number is attached to other Meta products and related activities," Al Shafei said. "This is why the IDF could plausibly utilize metadata to track and locate WhatsApp users."
While Meta and WhatsApp may not necessarily be collaborating with Israel, she said, "by the very act of collecting this information, they're making themselves vulnerable to abuse and intrusive external surveillance."
In turn, "by using WhatsApp, people are risking their lives," she added.
A WhatsApp spokesperson told Anadolu last month that "WhatsApp has no backdoors and we do not provide bulk information to any government," adding that "Meta has provided consistent transparency reports and those include the limited circumstances when WhatsApp information has been requested."
Al Shafei said Meta must "fully investigate" how WhatsApp's metadata may be used "to track, harm, or kill its users throughout Palestine."
"WhatsApp is used by billions of people and these users have a right to know what the dangers are in using the app," she said, "or what WhatsApp and Meta will do to proactively protect them from such misuse."
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"We need to take a broad approach to control sources that release PFAS into the atmosphere and into bodies of water," said one researcher, "since they eventually all end up in the lakes."
May 18, 2024
A first-of-its-kind study published this week shows that levels of toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are now so ubiquitous in the environmental that they have begun building up in the Great Lakes Basin after entering it through rainwater and the air, contaminating 95% of the United States' fresh surface water supply.
Researchers at Indiana University, Bloomington and Environment and Climate Change Canada published the study Thursday, revealing that "background levels" of PFAS, also called "forever chemicals," are so high that atmospheric counts were consistent throughout the basin.
"The PFAS in rain could be carried from local sources, or have traveled long distances from other regions. Regardless, it is a major source of pollution that contributes to the lakes' levels," reported The Guardian on Saturday.
The levels of PFAS in precipitation did not correlate with whether or not an area in the Great Lakes Basin was heavily industrialized, lead author Chunjie Xia, a postdoctoral associate at Indiana University, told The Hill.
"The levels in precipitation don't depend on the population," said Xia. "They are similar in Chicago, which is heavily populated, and at Eagle Harbor, Michigan, where there's maybe 500 people living in a 25-kilometer radius."
"That tells us the levels are ubiquitous," he said. "This is the first time we've seen that. We've never seen that for other pollutants before."
Within the basin, however, levels of PFAS were higher near urban areas.
Twenty percent of the world's freshwater is held in the Great Lakes Basin, while 10% of the U.S. population and 35% of Canadians live in the region.
In 2023, Duke University and the Environmental Working Group analyzed fish samples collected from the Environmental Protection Agency's monitoring program for the Great Lakes, and found that eating just one locally caught freshwater fish could be the equivalent of drinking PFAS-contaminated water for a month.
Forever chemicals have earned their nickname because they do not naturally break down and can continuously remain in and move through the environment. PFAS are used by dozens of industries to make products heat-, water-, and stain-resistant.
European lawmakers have proposed a ban that could go into effect as early as 2026, but Reutersreported Wednesday that the law could include exemptions for certain industries.
Last month, the Biden administration finalized a rule setting limits on PFAS in drinking water.
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In 'Abandonment of Public Education,' Louisiana to Allow Tax Dollars to Pay for Private Schools
"We must build and maintain a public education system that serves all children," said one Democratic lawmaker.
May 18, 2024
After an aggressive push by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, the Louisiana Senate advanced a bill this week that would allow public funds to be used for private school tuition—sending what one Democrat called an "abandonment" of the state's public schools to the state House, where it is expected to pass.
The state Senate approved the Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise (LA GATOR) Scholarship Program in a vote of 25-15 on Thursday, with just four Republicans joining the Democratic Party in opposing the bill.
The program would allow the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to create "education savings accounts" (ESAs), which would give families state tax dollars to pay for private school tuition, uniforms, and other expenses.
The grants would first be available to low-income families and special education students, but in the program's third year the ESAs are set to be available to all Louisiana families.
The legislation was briefly shelved this week over concerns about its cost, but Landry, backed by right-wing groups and donors, used television ads to push his party to support the ESAs.
Landry went as far as suggesting lawmakers could revise the state constitution to end a restriction mandating that certain public funds are set aside for K-12 public schools. He called on the state Senate to hold a special convention to do so, in order to unlock funding for the $520 million yearly cost of the LA GATOR program.
Moments before the Senate voted on Thursday, state Sen. Royce Duplessis (D-5) said the bill was "nothing short of an abandonment of public education."
"We as a state are making the decision and taking the step to say that it's too hard, it's too complex" to fund public schools, said Duplessis.
Landry told the Louisiana Illuminator that the success of the bill was "a big win for the kids of Louisiana," but local school board members, teachers, and superintendents lobbied Republicans ahead of the vote to protect funding for public schools, where a majority of students in the state are educated.
"These universal voucher bills are a step in the wrong direction," Larry Carter, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, toldPublic News Service earlier this month. "We've seen in other states around the country, like Arizona and Ohio, where these bills have been passed, [schools are] now facing a budget crisis, and we're hoping that we cannot go down that same road."
"If we're cutting that funding stream, Louisiana students will have fewer nurses and counselors, less options for after school programs, and certainly limited access to field trips and AP courses that help prepare them for their next step in life," he added.
Louisiana-based journalist Dayne Sherman said the LA Gator program will provide a lesson in "how to starve your local Louisiana public school, Clownfish-style."
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