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herbicide
Watchdogs Upset EPA Has 'Once Again Failed' to Limit Dicamba Herbicide Harm
"EPA has clear, damning evidence its mitigation has utterly failed to protect farmers, the environment, and endangered species," said the Center for Food Safety legal director.
Feb 17, 2023
"I call bullsh*t."
That's how Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, responded Thursday to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issuing limited restrictions for the use of over-the-top dicamba herbicides in four states.
Noting that it has been over a year since the Biden administration released a report "detailing just how incredibly devastating the 2020 dicamba approval has been," Donley said, "And now we're supposed to believe that four states not being able to use dicamba for two weeks in June accomplishes something?"
Under the EPA's rules for the 2023 season, farmers in Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa can't apply the herbicides Engenia, Tavium, and XtendiMax after June 12 or the V4 growth stage for soybeans and first square for cotton—whichever comes first. The previous end date for those states was June 20, which is the new cutoff for South Dakota, where farmers previously had until June 30.
Some experts warn that the timing of the EPA's move is "troubling" given the proximity to soybean planting. University of Illinois weed scientist Aaron Hager told FarmProgress that "it's going to be a challenge. I'm afraid for soybean farmers who have already made their seed and herbicide purchases for the 2023 growing season."
Meanwhile, longtime critics of the herbicide like Donley and George Kimbrell, legal director at the Center for Food Safety, called out the EPA for continuously failing to go far enough to limit harm from dicamba, given concerns about drift damage.
\u201cMore deck chairs on the titanic. EPA has clear, damning evidence its mitigation has utterly failed to protect farmers, the environment, and endangered species, yet once again blinked and failed to make meaningful changes. 1/1\u201d— George A Kimbrell (@George A Kimbrell) 1676589709
"This marks the fifth time in seven years EPA has made changes to dicamba's registration," Kimbrell said in a statement. "Yet faced with a mountain of data that its past measures have utterly failed to protect farmers, the environment, and endangered species, EPA once again failed to make meaningful changes."
"What EPA revised only affects four of 34 states, offers nothing to admitted continued risks to endangered species, and makes a label that already was impossible to follow in real-world farming even more impossible to follow," Kimbrell added.
"If allowed to stand, EPA's capitulation to pesticide companies will condemn many thousands of farmers to another year of devastating dicamba clouds injuring their crops, endangering their livelihoods, and tearing apart their rural communities," he warned, vowing to continue doing "everything we can to stop this harm."
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Biden EPA Admits Faulty Glyphosate Review Under Trump But Still Won't Take It Off US Market
"Time to face the music, not run and hide," said one critic of the agency's latest legal maneuver.
May 19, 2021
The Center for Food Safety on Wednesday denounced the Biden administration's Environmental Protection Agency for arguing that Roundup should remain on U.S. shelves for an undisclosed period of time even after admitting that the Trump-era review of glyphosate--the key ingredient found in Roundup, the world's most widely used herbicide--was flawed and requires a do-over.
"We will ask the court to deny this extraordinary request to paper over glyphosate's ecological harms only to approve it anyway down the road."
--George Kimbrell, CFS
In its federal court filing (pdf) requesting to redo the Trump administration's faulty assessment of glyphosate, the EPA failed to provide a deadline for a new decision; instead, the agency maintained that Roundup--created by agrochemical giant Monsanto, which was acquired in 2018 by the German pharmaceutical and biotech company Bayer--should stay on the market in the meantime.
The EPA's request comes as it faces two lawsuits, including one brought by a coalition of farmworkers and environmentalists represented by the Center for Food Safety (CFS), that seek to reverse the Trump EPA's approval of glyphosate, a decision that was made despite evidence that the substance--described by the World Health Organization as "probably carcinogenic"--poses threats to human health and to pollinators such as bumblebees and monarch butterflies.
"Rather than defend its prior decision, at the 11th hour EPA is asking for a mulligan and indefinite delay, despite having previously spent far too long, over a decade, in re-assessing it," CFS legal director George Kimbrell said Wednesday in a statement. "Worse, EPA admits its approval risks harms to farmers and endangered species, but makes no effort to halt it."
According to CFS:
EPA is required by law to re-assess each pesticide every 15 years in a process known as registration review. EPA completed part of its registration review of glyphosate in 2020, designating it an "interim" decision because it had failed to assess glyphosate's impacts to endangered species, or complete other key assessments, such as glyphosate's potential to disrupt hormonal systems and harm pollinators. The 2020 interim decision represented EPA's first comprehensive assessment of the herbicide since 1993.
After the ongoing lawsuits and the agency's most recent biological evaluation identified the deleterious social and environmental impacts of glyphosate, the EPA "admits it can no longer affirm glyphosate's putative benefits outweigh its risks and costs, or that measures imposed to mitigate risks are at all effective," CFS noted.
\u201cEPA also bases its request to "re-do" the #glyphosate registration in part upon its *own* draft Biological Evaluation, which found that glyphosate is likely to adversely affect 93% of exposed #EndangeredSpecies\u2014while proposing #Roundup should *stay on the market* for now. \ud83e\udd37\u200d\u2640\ufe0f\u201d— Center for Food Safety (@Center for Food Safety) 1621451495
Some of the harmful effects of glyphosate, according to CFS, include a heightened risk of cancer among farmworkers and others who spray glyphosate-based herbicides or are nonetheless subjected to it as a result of "off-field drift." Moreover, farmers must contend with the development of glyphosate-resistant superweeds, the organization said.
In addition, CFS noted, because Roundup kills the milkweed on which monarch butterflies rely for survival, it poses a danger to the once-ubiquitous pollinators. And before it suggested that Roundup continue to be sold in the U.S. for an unspecified period of time, the EPA found that the herbicide is likely to adversely affect 93% of exposed species under the Endangered Species Act as well as 96% of their critical habitats.
In his statement, Kimbrell said that "we will ask the court to deny this extraordinary request to paper over glyphosate's ecological harms only to approve it anyway down the road."
"Time to face the music, not run and hide," he added.
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EU Moves to Reapprove Monsanto's Toxic Glyphosate
Europe plans to re-approve "probable carcinogen" for another 15 years—just as traces of the toxin are discovered in major brands of feminine products
Feb 25, 2016
In defiance of popular sentiment and scientific warnings, the European Commission plans to re-approve the use of controversial weedkiller glyphosate, a "probable carcinogen" according to the WHO, for another 15 years, according to a draft regulation (pdf) obtained by Bloomberg BNA.
The herbicide, the key ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, is already so widely used in Europe that two-thirds of bread loaves sold in Britain contain residue from the toxic chemical, the Guardian reported in 2014.
The European Commission's plans, which will be voted on at a meeting on March 7th and 8th, were announced on the heels of a report published on Tuesday by the French magazine 60 Millions de Consommateurs. The report found traces of glyphosate and other industrial toxins in five out of eleven brands of feminine hygiene products.
The Roundup chemical was even discovered in so-called "organic" panty liners made by the French feminine product company Organyce. The company has pulled 3,100 boxes of its products from stores in France and Canada "as a precautionary measure" after internal tests confirmed the herbicide's presence in its products, an Organyce spokesperson told the Independent.
The European Commission's plans to approve the toxic chemical followed the EU ombudsman's strong critique (pdf) of the body's regulatory process, published just this week. The commission's drafted regulation "flew in the face of a censure of the commission by the EU ombudsman," environmentalists told the Guardian.
The ombudsman, Emily O'Reilly, found that the commission may have been too "lenient in its practices," risking the health of humans, animals, and the planet.
Bloomberg BNA reports:
In a Feb. 22 decision, the Ombudsman said that in some cases, the commission granted pesticide approvals through a so-called confirmatory data procedure, under which applicants were asked to provide additional risk assessments and other data on the potential risks of substances. Still, the commission allowed the approvals anyway while waiting for the additional information.
The Ombudsman said a 1991 EU law on pesticide authorizations (Directive 91/414/EEC) "does not contain an express legal basis" for the use of the confirmatory data procedure, and by using the procedure, the commission may have acted in a way that was "unlawful and contrary to the principles of good administration."
A 2009 EU regulation on pesticide authorizations (Regulation 1107/2009) that replaced the 1991 directive did include a firmer legal base for the procedure. Still, the procedure should be used only in "exceptional cases" when the likelihood of a pesticide evaluation being changed was "minor," the Ombudsman said.
Pesticide Action Network (PAN), a coalition of over 600 NGOs and institutions worldwide working to replace harmful pesticides with ecological alternatives, brought the original complaint about the commission's approval process to the ombudsman.
In a press release on Tuesday, PAN Europe's chemicals coordinator argued that the commission had "let the interests of industry and farmers prevail over the interests of the public in allowing harmful pesticides on the market with data gaps and high risks. This structural violation of the rules implies that the pesticides currently on the market are unsafe."
Martin Hausling, the agriculture and public health spokesman for The Greens/European Free Alliance, argued that "[g]iven the serious health concerns and conflicting scientific advice, the commission should be respecting its duty to apply the precautionary principle and not steamrolling through approval of this highly controversial substance."
The commission has agreed to submit a report demonstrating that it has taken action to make the ombudsman's requested fixes to its approval process in two years--but with its proposed new 15-year lease, glyphosate would not be up for regulatory consideration again until 2031.
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