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'This Is the PFAS Presidency': Trump EPA Approves Another Forever Chemical Pesticide
"The Trump administration's EPA is once again showing its disdain for Americans' health and the natural world."
Jul 01, 2026
Environmental and public health advocates on Wednesday ripped the US Environmental Protection Agency's fifth approval of a "forever chemical" pesticide during the current term of President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to "Make America Healthy Again."
Despite that pledge, Trump's second administration—much like his first—has served the pesticide industry in various ways, including by putting out a MAHA report that echoes industry talking points, installing a former industry lobbyist in a key EPA post, backing Bayer-owned Monsanto over cancer patients at the US Supreme Court, and issuing an executive order that mandates the production of glyphosate.
Under Trump, the EPA has also approved or reapproved various controversial pesticides, from atrazine and dicamba to trifludimoxazin, which was approved late Tuesday. Like diflufenican and epyrifenacil, which were authorized by the EPA earlier Tuesday, as well as cyclobutrifluram and isocycloseram, which got a green light from the agency last November, trifludimoxazin is what some scientists and campaigners call a forever chemical pesticide.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)—which have been used in not only pesticides but also fabrics, firefighting foam, nonstick cookware, and other household products—are widely known as forever chemicals because they don't break down naturally. They're also linked to a range of health issues, including various cancers.
"This is the PFAS presidency brought to you by Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin," Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, declared Wednesday.
As with his Tuesday critique of the Trump EPA approving diflufenican and epyrifenacil, Donley pointed to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in favor of Trump-backed Bayer, rather than the thousands of Americans who argue that Monsanto's glyphosate-based weedkiller Roundup caused their cancer.
"Waiting to open the floodgates on new pesticide approvals until after the Supreme Court granted immunity to pesticide companies takes a special kind of callousness," he said.
Bill Freese, science director at Center for Food Safety (CFS), similarly said Wednesday that "with yesterday's pesticide approvals, the Trump administration's EPA is once again showing its disdain for Americans' health and the natural world."
"The EPA's pesticide division is seemingly no longer able to recognize evidence that a pesticide causes cancer, even when it's the pesticide company's own studies that show it," he continued. "And as per usual, EPA dismisses out of hand incriminating independent studies by scientists not affiliated with the pesticide industry."
In addition to the PFAS pesticides, the EPA is under fire this week for approving new uses for chlormequat, a non-PFAS pesticide tied to reproductive issues, and the fungicide fluoxapiprolin.
CFS co-executive director Sylvia Wu pointed out that the agency dismissed studies showing that fluoxapiprolin and epyrifenacil both produce tumors in laboratory rodents and classified both as "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans."
"The EPA's illegitimate rejection of the evidence that these two pesticides cause cancer is very similar to the tricks it pulled in denying glyphosate could cause cancer," Wu said. "These blatant violations of the agency's own cancer guidelines are unacceptable."
As for chlormequat, Freese said that "EPA should never have approved this endocrine-disrupting pesticide, particularly since its persistence and potential for widespread use on wheat and other widely consumed grains will mean universal exposure."
Already, "chlormequat is found in the urine of 90% of Americans, thought to come mostly from residues on imported foods where the pesticide has been used," the Center for Biological Diversity noted Wednesday. Like Freese, the group warned that "approval of its use on US wheat and oats ensures that exposure to the US population will increase dramatically."
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EPA Ripped for 'Routinely' Failing to Label Cancer-Causing Pesticides
"If the agency is going to allow such chemicals to be freely sold at Home Depot, Walmart, and farm supply stores, the very least the EPA must do is require a clear cancer warning on the label," said one critic.
Mar 30, 2026
The US Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly failed to warn consumers of the cancer risks posed by pesticides—even when its own research has found those products to be carcinogenic, a pair of green groups said Monday.
The Center for Food Safety studied the EPA's permitted risk level in active components of both currently approved and legacy pesticides. CFS researchers found that the EPA allowed pesticides with a cancer risk "as high as 1 in every 100 people exposed, a far greater level than the EPA’s benchmark of a 1-in-a-million chance of developing cancer."
"Of the 570 unique pesticide chemicals that EPA’s Office of Pesticide program has classified for carcinogenic potential since 1985, over one-third (200, or 35%) are either possible human carcinogens (127) or likely to be carcinogenic to humans (73)," the CFS report notes. "The status of 62 others (11%) is uncertain, because EPA lacks sufficient data to make a determination.
A second report, from the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), shows that of the 200 pesticides that are possible or likely human carcinogens, 125 are still registered for use.
CBD analyzed the labels of every pesticide currently approved by the EPA and found that the agency has placed cancer warnings on just 69 of 4,919 pesticide labels (1.4%) "containing an active ingredient that the agency has designated a 'likely' human carcinogen." Additionally, the EPA has put cancer warnings on just 242 of the 22,147 pesticide labels (1.1%) that "contain an ingredient the agency has designated as a 'possible' human carcinogen."
CFS science director Bill Freeses said in a statement Monday: “It’s bad enough that the EPA approves cancer-causing pesticides. But if the agency is going to allow such chemicals to be freely sold at Home Depot, Walmart, and farm supply stores, the very least the EPA must do is require a clear cancer warning on the label. Warnings save lives by incentivizing users to wear protective equipment that reduces risk."
Lori Ann Burd, director of environmental health at the CBD, said on Monday that “it's dumbfounding that the EPA has failed to require any cancer warning on thousands of pesticide products sold to the public that the agency itself has linked to cancer."
“Why should anyone have confidence in the EPA’s ability to keep tabs on the pesticide industry and protect us all from harmful poisons when it won’t even compel companies to put long-term health warnings on pesticides it knows are really dangerous?" she added.
Last month, CFS, CBD, and others denounced the EPA's reapproval of the pesticide dicamba—which scientific studies have linked to increased risk of cancer and hypothyroidism in high-dose exposure—for certain cotton and soybean crops.
The new CFS and CBD analyses come ahead of next month's oral arguments in Monsanto Company v. John L. Durnell, a case before the US Supreme Court in which Bayer, the Germany-based pharma giant that bought Monsanto in 2018, is seeking substantial immunity from future lawsuits filed by people in the United States who used glyphosate-based products like Roundup weedkiller and were then diagnosed with rare pesticide-linked cancers. The company has paid out billions of dollars to settle such suits.
CBD and other advocacy groups have also warned that the industry-backed Farm Bill currently advancing in the Republican-controlled Congress weakens or delays pesticide safety regulation, preempts state-level cancer warning rules, and shields chemical companies from lawsuits.
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'Industry Cronies' at Trump's EPA Reapprove Dangerous Pesticide Dicamba
"It’s hard to see how Making America Healthy Again was anything but another broken campaign promise," said one critic.
Feb 06, 2026
The US Environmental Protection Agency on Friday announced its anticipated reapproval of dicamba for two key crops, a move which, given the pesticide's proven health risks, places the EPA at apparent odds with President Donald Trump's vow to "Make America Healthy Again."
“The industry cronies at the EPA just approved a pesticide that drifts away from application sites for miles and poisons everything it touches,” Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in response to Friday's announcement.
“With the EPA taking aggressive pro-pesticide industry actions like this, it’s hard to see how Making America Healthy Again was anything but another broken campaign promise," Donley added. "When push comes to shove, this administration is willing to bend over backward to appease the pesticide industry, regardless of the consequences to public health or the environment.”
The EPA said in a statement that the agency "established the strongest protections in agency history for over-the-top (OTT) dicamba application on dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybean crops," and that "this decision responds directly to the strong advocacy of America's cotton and soybean farmers."
While scientific studies have linked exposure to high levels of dicamba to increased risk of cancer and hypothyroidism and the European Union has classified dicamba as a category II suspected endocrine disruptor, the EPA said Friday that "when applied according to the new label instructions," it "found no unreasonable risk to human health and the environment from OTT dicamba use."
This is the third time the EPA has approved dicamba for OTT use. On both prior occasions, federal courts blocked the approvals, citing underestimation of the risk of chemical drift that could harm neighboring farms.
The agency highlighted new restrictions on dicamba use it said will reduce risk of drift.
"EPA recognizes that previous drift issues created legitimate concerns, and designed these new label restrictions to directly address them, including cutting the amount of dicamba that can be used annually in half, doubling required safety agents, requiring conservation practices to protect endangered species, and restricting applications during high temperatures when exposure and volatility risks increase," it said.
Critics noted that the EPA during the Biden administration published a report revealing that during Trump’s first term, senior administration officials intentionally excluded scientific evidence of dicamba-related hazards, including the risk of widespread drift damage, prior to a previous reapproval.
Others pointed to the recent appointment of former American Soybean Associate lobbyist and dicamba advocate Kyle Kunkler as the EPA's pesticides chief.
"Kunkler works under two former lobbyists for the American Chemistry Council, Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, who are now overseen by a fourth industry lobbyist, Doug Troutman, who was recently confirmed to lead the chemicals office following endorsement by the chemical council," the Center for Food Safety (CFS) noted Friday.
The Trump EPA has also come under fire for promoting the alleged safety of atrazine, a herbicide that the World Health Organization says probably causes cancer, and for pushing the US Supreme Court to shield Bayer, which makes the likely carcinogenic weedkiller Roundup, from thousands of lawsuits.
CFS science director Bill Freese said that “the Trump administration’s hostility to farmers and rural America knows no bounds."
“Dicamba drift damage threatens farmers’ livelihoods and tears apart rural communities," Freese added. "And these are farmers and communities already reeling from Trump’s [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids on farmworkers, the trade war shutdown of soybean exports to China, and Trump’s bailout of Argentina, whose farmers are selling soybeans to the Chinese—soybeans China used to buy from American growers.”
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A Month After Trump Doubles Down on Atrazine, WHO Dubs It 'Probably Carcinogenic to Humans'
"It is outrageously irresponsible that we still allow use of this dangerous poison in the United States," said the Center for Biological Diversity's environmental health science director.
Nov 21, 2025
Just a month after the Trump administration doubled down on the alleged safety of atrazine, a United Nations agency said on Friday that the pesticide—which is banned by dozens of countries but commonly used on corn, sugarcane, and sorghum in the United States—probably causes cancer.
"It is outrageously irresponsible that we still allow use of this dangerous poison in the United States," said Nathan Donley, the Center for Biological Diversity's environmental health science director, in a Friday statement. "This finding is just the latest indictment of the industry-controlled US pesticide oversight process that is failing to protect people and wildlife from chemicals linked to numerous health harms."
Research into and alarm over atrazine have mounted since the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer initially concluded in 1999 that it was not classifiable as carcinogenic to humans. IACR has now announced new findings for atrazine and alachlor, another herbicide widely used on crops, as well as the agricultural fungicide vinclozolin.
Of the three, only atrazine was previously examined by IARC. From October 28 to November 4, a working group of 22 international experts from a dozen countries met in France to evaluate the carcinogenicity of pesticides. They classified vinclozolin as "possibly carcinogenic to humans, and both alachlor and atrazine as "probably carcinogenic to humans."
The latter two decisions were based on a combination of limited evidence for cancer in humans, sufficient evidence for cancer in animals, and strong mechanistic evidence in experimental systems. IARC said that "for atrazine, positive associations have been observed for non-Hodgkin lymphoma that is positive for the chromosomal translocation t(14;18)."
A couple of weeks before that IARC meeting, the Trump administration sparked outrage with a US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) draft opinion claiming that atrazine does not pose an extinction risk to a single protected animal or plant.
That draft opinion came as President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were already under fire for the second Make America Healthy Again report. After the first MAHA publication noted concerns regarding pesticides, even naming atrazine, agribusiness lobbyists confronted the administration, and the following document ultimately featured pesticide industry talking points.
The second report's "only mention of pesticides is an Orwellian promise to ensure 'confidence in EPA's robust pesticide review procedures'—procedures courts have repeatedly found unlawful and that frontline communities know cannot be trusted," the Center for Food Safety said after its September release. "Instead, it says that it will speed up pesticide approval and it will 'partner' with the pesticide industry to 'educate' the public about the 'robust review' of EPA's regulation of pesticides to provide the public with 'confidence.'"
Then came the USFWS draft, which Center for Food Safety senior attorney Sylvia Wu said "makes clear that despite the rhetoric of MAHA, there will be no robust review of the dangers of pesticides by the Trump administration... Instead, a toxic poison like atrazine will continue to contaminate our lands and waters, making our children sick for decades to come."
Wu's group has long been critical of atrazine. During the first Trump administration, it was part of a coalition that sued over the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) 2020 reapproval of the herbicide. So was the Center for Biological Diversity—which was also angered by the USFWS document, with Donley calling it "an absolute joke."
Donley took aim at the Trump administration again on Friday, after IACR announced its new classification for atrazine.
"Despite its rhetoric to the contrary, there is no better friend of atrazine than the Trump administration," he said. "Hiding behind the rhetoric of MAHA, EPA reapproval of a poison that's likely to keep Americans sick for generations is moving ahead full steam."
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Trump EPA 'Hitting New Heights of Absurdity' With Plan to Reapprove Pesticide Dicamba
"This is what happens when pesticide oversight is controlled by industry lobbyists," said one campaigner.
Jul 23, 2025
Despite U.S. President Donald Trump's supposed goal to "Make America Healthy Again," his administration is moving to reregister dicamba, a pesticide twice banned by federal courts, for use on genetically engineered cotton and soybeans.
In response to legal challenges from the Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, National Family Farm Coalition, and the Pesticide Action Network, courts ruled against the herbicide's registration in 2020 and again last year.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced its latest push to allow the use of dicamba on Wednesday, detailing proposed mitigation efforts—including temperature restrictions and the use of drift reduction agents—that EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou told The Washington Post would "minimize impact to certain species and the environment."
The EPA's proposed registration is now open for public comment until August 22, but supporters and critics are already weighing in. While the pesticide companies welcomed the agency's attempt to allow dicamba products from BASF, Bayer, and Syngenta, the advocacy groups behind the court battles sharply called out the Trump administration.
"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 the Center for Food Safety, in a statement.
"If we allow these proposed decisions to go through, farmers and residents throughout rural America will again see their crops, trees, and home gardens decimated by dicamba drift, and natural areas like wildlife refuges will also suffer," he warned. "EPA must reverse course and withdraw its plans to reapprove this hazardous herbicide."
Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, declared that "Trump's EPA is hitting new heights of absurdity by planning to greenlight a pesticide that's caused the most extensive drift damage in U.S. agricultural history and twice been thrown out by federal courts."
"This is what happens when pesticide oversight is controlled by industry lobbyists," he charged. "Corporate fat cats get their payday and everyone else suffers the consequences."
The centers pointed out that "the decision to seek reapproval comes less than a month after Kyle Kunkler, a former lobbyist for the American Soybean Association, was installed as the deputy assistant administrator for pesticides in the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. The ASA has been a vocal cheerleader for dicamba since its initial approval for use on soybeans in 2016, despite the fact that soybeans have been the most widely damaged crop."
The Post asked the EPA whether Kunkler's recent appointment influenced the dicamba decision. In response, Vaseliou said that the "EPA follows the federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act when registering pesticides" and any insinuation otherwise was "further 'journalism' malpractice by The Washington Post."
After Kunkler's new job was made public last month, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) also flagged his "years of advocating against restrictions on farm chemicals such as glyphosate and atrazine," and stressed that "these are the very pesticides singled out in Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 'Make America Healthy Again' report for their potential links to chronic illness in children."
"The appointment of Kyle Kunkler sends a loud, clear message: Industry influence is back in charge at the EPA," said EWG president Ken Cook at the time. "It's a stunning reversal of the campaign promises Trump and RFK Jr. made to their MAHA followers—that they'd stand up to chemical giants and protect children from dangerous pesticides."
"To those who genuinely believed the MAHA movement would lead to meaningful change on toxic exposures: We understand the hope," he said. "But hope doesn't regulate pesticides. People with power do. And this pick all but guarantees the status quo will remain untouched."
Cook—whose group has also sounded the alarm about dicamba—concluded that Kunkler's EPA post "is but the latest example of the Trump administration's sweeping betrayal of environmental protection and public health."
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'Win for Public Health' as FDA Bans Carcinogenic Red Dye No. 3 in Food and Drinks
"At long last, the FDA is ending the regulatory paradox of Red 3 being illegal for use in lipstick, but perfectly legal to feed to children in the form of candy," said one advocate.
Jan 15, 2025
It's been used to color everything from candy to soft drinks to even watermelon—but after decades of knowing that it causes cancer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is finally banning erythrosine, popularly known as Red Dye No. 3, in foods and beverages.
Red Dye No. 3—commonly used to color maraschino cherries, fruit cocktails, toaster pastries, sodas, seasonal candies, cough syrups, and many other orally consumed products—has been known to cause cancer in animals since the 1980s. It has been banned in cosmetics since 1990. Manufacturers have until January 2027 to remove the toxic additive from products subject to the ban.
"This is exactly the action we need to see from the FDA."
"Because the FDA failed to uphold its legal obligation to fully ban cancer-causing additives, Red 3 remained permitted in foods, supplements, and oral drugs more than 34 years later," the Center for Science in the Public Interest said in a statement Wednesday. "That changed on January 16, 2025, thanks to a color additive petition filed by CSPI in 2022."
CSPI called the ban "a win for public health."
"At long last, the FDA is ending the regulatory paradox of Red 3 being illegal for use in lipstick, but perfectly legal to feed to children in the form of candy," Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said in a statement. "The primary purpose of food dyes is to make candy, drinks, and other processed foods more attractive. When the function is purely aesthetic, why accept any cancer risk?"
In addition to CSPI, numerous other groups and activists including the Center for Food Safety, Environmental Working Group (EWG), and Food & Water Watch (FWW) had petitioned the FDA for the ban.
"We wouldn't be celebrating this historic decision today without the relentless leadership of public health champions like Michael Jacobson and others who took up this fight decades ago on behalf of consumers," EWG president and co-founder Ken Cook said in a statement hailing the ban. "We all owe a debt of gratitude to Michael and the other early leaders who pushed the FDA to remove toxic chemical ingredients from the nation's food supply."
FWW senior food policy analyst Rebecca Wolf said that "this move by the FDA is long overdue, but represents a step in the right direction for consumer safety from harmful, cancer-causing chemicals."
"This is exactly the action we need to see from the FDA," Wolf added. "If the incoming FDA is serious about food safety and system reform, they should build on this win by endorsing scientifically sound policies and regulatory changes that Food & Water Watch has supported for years. These include ending the GRAS loophole that companies use to pollute our food system, removing antibiotics from animal feed, and supporting a ban on harmful chemicals in food."
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Experts Warn of Toxins in GM Corn Amid US-Mexico Trade Dispute
"The Mexican government is both wise and on solid ground in refusing to allow its people to participate in the experiment that the U.S. government is seeking to impose."
Mar 26, 2024
Friends of the Earth U.S. on Monday released a brief backing Mexico's ban on genetically modified corn for human consumption, which the green group recently submitted to a dispute settlement panel charged with considering the U.S. government's challenge to the policy.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced plans to phase out the herbicide glyphosate as well as genetically modified (GM) or genetically engineered (GE) corn in 2020. Last year he issued an updated decree making clear the ban does not apply to corn imports for livestock feed and industrial use. Still, the Biden administration objected and, after fruitless formal negotiations, requested the panel under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
"The U.S. government has not presented an 'appropriate' risk assessment to the tribunal as called for in the USMCA dispute because such an assessment has never been done in the U.S. or anywhere in the world," said agricultural economist Charles Benbrook, who wrote the brief with Kendra Klein, director of science at Friends of the Earth U.S.
"The U.S. is, in effect, asking Mexico to trust the completeness and accuracy of the initial GE corn safety assessments carried out 15 to 30 years ago by the companies working to bring GE corn events to market."
The group's 13-page brief lays out health concerns related to GM corn and glyphosate, and the shortcomings of U.S. analyses and policies. It also stresses the stakes of the panel's decision, highlighting that "corn is the caloric backbone of the Mexican food supply, accounting, on average, for 50% of the calories and protein in the Mexican diet."
Blasting the Biden administration's case statement to the panel as "seriously deficient," Klein said Monday that "it lacks basic information about the toxins expressed in contemporary GMO corn varieties and their levels. The U.S. submission also ignores dozens of studies linking the insecticidal toxins and glyphosate residues found in GMO corn to adverse impacts on public health."
The brief explains that "since the commercial introduction of GE corn in 1996 and event-specific approvals in the 1990s and 2000s, dramatic changes have occurred in corn production systems. There has been an approximate fourfold increase in the number of toxins and pesticides applied on the average hectare of contemporary GE industrial corn compared to the early 1990s. Unfortunately, this upward trend is bound to continue, and may accelerate."
The U.S. statement's assurances about risks from Bacillus thuringiensis or vegetative insecticidal protein (Bt/VIP) residues "are not based on data and science," the brief warns.
"The U.S. is, in effect, asking Mexico to trust the completeness and accuracy of the initial GE corn safety assessments carried out 15 to 30 years ago by the companies working to bring GE corn events to market," the document says. "The Mexican government is both wise and on solid ground in refusing to allow its people to participate in the experiment that the U.S. government is seeking to impose on Mexico."
"The absence of any systematic monitoring of human exposure levels to Bt/VIP toxins and herbicides from consumption of corn-based foods is regrettable," the brief adds. "It is also unfortunate that the U.S. government rejected the Mexican proposal to jointly design and carry out a modern battery of studies able to overcome gaps in knowledge regarding GE corn impacts."
"The U.S. government's case against Mexico has no more scientific merit than its sham GMO regulatory regime, and should be rejected by the USMCA dispute resolution panel."
Friends of the Earth isn't the only U.S.-based group formally supporting the Mexican government in the USMCA process. The Center for Food Safety sent a 10-page submission by science director Bill Freese, an expert on biotech regulation, to the panel on March 15. His analysis addresses U.S. regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMO) along with the risks of GM corn and glyphosate.
"GMO regulation in the U.S. was crafted by Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, and is a critical part of our government's promotion of the biotechnology industry," Freese said last week, referring to the company known for the glyphosate-based weedkiller Roundup. "The aim is to quell concerns and promote acceptance of GMOs, domestically and abroad, rather than critically evaluate potential toxicity or allergenicity."
His submission notes that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration "does not require a GE plant developer to do anything prior to marketing its GE crop or food derived from it. Instead, FDA operates what it calls a voluntary consultation program that is designed to enhance consumer confidence and speed GE crops to market."
"When governmental review is optional; and even when it's conducted, starts and ends with the regulated company's safety assurance—what's the point?" Freese asked. "Clearly, it's the PR value of a governmental rubber stamp."
"The Mexican government's prohibition of GM corn for tortillas and other masa corn products is fully justified," he asserted. "The U.S. government's case against Mexico has no more scientific merit than its sham GMO regulatory regime, and should be rejected by the USMCA dispute resolution panel."
In a Common Dreams opinion piece last week, Ernesto Hernández-López, a law professor at Chapman University in California, pointed out that Mexico's recent submission to the panel also "offers scientific proof and lots of it," including "over 150 scientific studies, referred to in peer-review journals, systemic research reviews, and more."
"Mexico incorporates perspectives from toxicology, pediatrics, plant biology, hematology, epidemiology, public health, and data mining, to name a few," he wrote. "This clearly and loudly responds to American persistence. The practical result: American leaders cannot claim there is no science supporting the decree. They may disagree with or dislike the findings, but there is proof."
The Biden administration's effort to quash the Mexican policy notably comes despite the lack of impact on trade. While implementing its ban last year, "Mexico also made its largest corn purchase from the U.S., 15.3 million metric tons," National Geographic reported last month.
Kenneth Smith Ramos, former Mexican chief negotiator for the USMCA, told the outlet that "right now, it may not have a big economic impact because what Mexico is using to produce flour, cornmeal, and tortillas is a very small percentage of their overall imports; but that does not mean the U.S. is not concerned with this being the tip of the iceberg."
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Federal Dicamba Ruling Called 'Vital Victory for Farmers and the Environment'
"The court today resoundingly reaffirmed what we have always maintained: The EPA's and Monsanto's claims of dicamba's safety were irresponsible and unlawful," said one plaintiff.
Feb 06, 2024
In what one plaintiff called "a sweeping victory for family farmers and dozens of endangered plants and animals," a federal court in Arizona on Tuesday rescinded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 2020 approval of the highly volatile herbicide dicamba for use on certain genetically engineered crops.
In a 47-page ruling, U.S. District Judge David C. Bury found that the EPA failed to comply with public notice and comment requirements under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), legislation passed in 1947 to protect agricultural workers, consumers, and the environment.
"This is a vital victory for farmers and the environment," said George Kimbrell, legal director at the Center for Food Safety (CFS), a plaintiff in the case. "Time and time again, the evidence has shown that dicamba cannot be used without causing massive and unprecedented harm to farms as well as endangering plants and pollinators."
"The court today resoundingly reaffirmed what we have always maintained: The EPA's and Monsanto's claims of dicamba's safety were irresponsible and unlawful," Kimbrell added.
Dicamba has damaged millions of acres of U.S. cropland since the EPA, during the Trump administration, dubiously approved its use on genetically engineered cotton and soybeans developed by Monsanto, which was acquired by Bayer in 2018.
The EPA subsequently identified spray drift as the main environmental risk for dicamba due to its potential to contaminate nontargeted crops, declaring that since 2016 "there has been a substantial increase in the overall number of reported nontarget plant incidents."
As CFS explained on Tuesday:
In today's decision, the court canceled dicamba's over-the-top use, holding that EPA violated FIFRA's public input requirement prior to the approval. This violation is "very serious," according to the court, especially because the 9th Circuit previously held EPA failed to consider serious risks of over-the-top dicamba in issuing the prior registration. The court outlined the massive damage to stakeholders that were deprived of their opportunity to comment, such as growers that do not use over-the-top dicamba and suffered significant financial losses and states that repeatedly reported landscape-level damage yet, in the same 2020 decision, lost the ability to impose restrictions greater than those imposed by the federal government without formal legislative and/or rulemaking processes. As a result, the court found "the EPA is unlikely to issue the same registrations" again after taking these stakeholders' concerns into account.
"We are grateful that the court held the EPA and Monsanto accountable for the massive damage from dicamba to farmers, farmworkers, and the environment, and halted its use," Lisa Griffith of the National Family Farm Coalition—another plaintiff in the case—said in a statement Tuesday. "The pesticide system that Monsanto sells should not be sprayed as it cannot be sprayed safely."
Tuesday's decision in Arizona follows a July 2022 ruling by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis that found Monsanto and BASF were liable for damage to a Missouri peach farmer's groves caused by dicamba.
A 2021 EPA report revealed that high-ranking Trump administration officials intentionally excluded scientific evidence of dicamba-related hazards, including the risk of widespread drift damage, before reapproving the dangerous chemical. A separate EPA report described the widespread harm to farmers and the environment caused by dicamba during the 2020 growing season.
"Every summer since the approval of dicamba, our farm has suffered significant damage to a wide range of vegetable crops," said Rob Faux, a farmer and communications manager at the advocacy group Pesticide Action Network, a case plaintiff. "Today's decision provides much-needed and overdue protection for farmers and the environment."
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'Groundbreaking' Legal Action Demands EPA Finally Ban Glyphosate
"EPA lacks a legal human health assessment of glyphosate to support its current use," said a lawyer for the Center for Food Safety.
Dec 13, 2023
Citing research from the U.S. government's own National Institutes of Health, a coalition of environmental and farmworkers groups said Wednesday that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is out of excuses for continuing to allow the use of the herbicide glyphosate, which has been linked to cancer in people who are exposed to it.
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a petition with the EPA on behalf of Beyond Pesticides and four farmworkers groups, including Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, saying glyphosate's registration in the U.S. is illegal.
The petition was filed a week after cancer scientists at the NIH published a study in Environmental Health Perspectives, which found that male farmers had "markers of genotoxicity" when they reported high levels of glyphosate use.
The study is only the latest to link glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used weedkiller Roundup, with cancer and other health issues. The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer warned in 2015 that glyphosate is "probably carcinogenic to humans," and Roundup manufacturer Monsanto—now owned by Bayer—was ordered to pay more than $2.3 billion by juries in 2018 and 2019 for failing to warn the public about the product's risks.
"Farmworker women and their families have experienced the damaging health effects of pesticides for far too long," said Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. "EPA must protect the nation's farmworkers and our environment by immediately suspending and canceling all glyphosate registrations."
Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit struck down the EPA's claim that glyphosate is safe.
Despite the mounting evidence of the harmful effects of glyphosate, said CFS on Wednesday, "EPA has declined to act."
"EPA lacks a legal human health assessment of glyphosate to support its current use," the group said.
Pegga Mosavi, an attorney at CFS, said the petition provides the Biden administration with "a blueprint... to do what the law and science require and finally cancel glyphosate's registration."
"There is a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that glyphosate endangers public health, and poses cancer risks to farmers and other Roundup users," said Mosavi. "Glyphosate formulations are also an environmental hazard and have driven an epidemic of resistant weeds that plague farmers. After last year's court decision, EPA has no legal legs to stand on. EPA must take action now."
Environmental Health Perspectives also published an opinion article by health researchers who found the NIH study should be considered in glyphosate safety evaluations.
"There is really compelling new science out there," Bill Freese, science director at CFS, told The Guardian. "It's becoming increasingly untenable for the agency to deny the cancer hazard."
The group said the EPA should suspend the use of glyphosate—which is already banned for household use in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and for public use in Germany—until its registration can be canceled or the agency can prove the herbicide meets required safety standards under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).
"In accordance with FIFRA, EPA can register a pesticide only upon determining that it will cause no unreasonable adverse effects on the environment when used in accordance with widespread and commonly recognized practice," reads the executive summary of the petition. "Glyphosate remains registered despite no demonstration by EPA that it can meet the required FIFRA safety standard for this herbicide's currently approved uses. In other words, glyphosate as it's currently used has no legal safety assessment on record."
Freese noted that in the past, the EPA acknowledged glyphosate's adverse effects on the liver, kidneys, reproductive system, and its link to cancer.
"But as Monsanto sought ever wider uses for its blockbuster herbicide," said Freese, EPA consigned those incriminating studies to regulatory oblivion, thus facilitating greater use, even as independent scientists confirmed the harms EPA now denies."
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Ignoring 'Mounting Threat to Clean Water,' EPA Denies Factory Farm Pollution Petition
"We know that animal factories are a huge source of water pollution and that our freshwater is in crisis, and yet EPA has failed to uphold its duty to protect our environment from this industry," said one advocate.
Aug 16, 2023
Public health and environmental advocacy groups said that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chose to benefit the factory farming industry instead of protecting communities and drinking water late Tuesday when it denied an anti-pollution petition filed in 2017 by nearly three dozen groups.
Food & Water Watch (FWW), the Center for Food Safety (CFS), and North Carolina Environmental Justice Network were among the organizations that filed the petition six years ago and sued the agency last year due to its "unreasonable delay" in answering the request for stronger rules to prevent water pollution from hundreds of thousands of factory farms across the United States.
The EPA responded to the legal challenge Tuesday by denying the original petition and announcing it would form a federal subcommittee to study the effects of pollution from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and make recommendations to the agency.
The subcommittee is expected to convene in 2024 and its work could take 12-18 months, leaving open the possibility that—should President Joe Biden lose his reelection campaign next year—the question of regulating factory farm pollution could be left up to a Republican administration.
"Factory farms pose a significant and mounting threat to clean water, largely because EPA's weak rules have left most of the industry entirely unregulated," said Tarah Heinzen, legal director for FWW. "EPA's deeply flawed response amounts to yet more delay, and completely misses the moment."
Though the EPA pledged to study the effects of water pollution from factory farms, the petitioners noted that the impact has already been well-documented.
According to the Sierra Club, "water pollution is possible at virtually any point in a CAFO's operation," as waste from factory farms is generally not treated for disease-causing pathogens, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, or heavy metals.
Animal waste spills and overflows can lead to contaminated runoff that ends up in waterways, stormwater can mix with manure and milkhouse waste that flows into drains, waste storage units can overflow or burst, and catch basins can inadvertently drain waste into waterways.
CFS said in a statement that factory farms "operate like sewerless cities" and can contaminate "drinking water with cancer-causing nitrates" as well as flooding homes with waste during storms and leaving communities without safe places for water recreation.
Citing the EPA's own data in a 2020 brief, FWW found that pollution from factory farms "threatens or impairs over 14,000 miles of rivers and streams and more than 90,000 acres of lakes and ponds nationwide."
"We know that animal factories are a huge source of water pollution and that our freshwater is in crisis, and yet EPA has failed to uphold its duty to protect our environment from this industry," said Amy van Saun, a senior attorney with CFS. "We have a right to clean and safe water and we cannot afford to wait any longer to stop the tide of pollution from animal factories."
The 2017 petition called on the EPA to improve the CAFO permitting process, as fewer than one-third of the largest 21,000 factory farms have National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits, which regulate the point sources which discharge pollutants into waterways.
Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, said that by denying the petition the EPA "chose to further a special exemption for factory farms that benefits global meat companies while undermining independent farmers raising animals in ways that protect our water."
"Today's EPA decision kicks the can down the road," he said, "instead of acting to protect rural communities and our nation's waterways."
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