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pesticide
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.
"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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In Zika-Gripped Florida, Concerns Mount Over Insecticide Use - and Efficacy
"It's essentially a neurotoxin and can result in unborn children in particular having neurodevelopmental problems," expert says of pesticide naled
Aug 26, 2016
The anti-Zika aerial insecticide spraying program is raising health concerns in Florida and beyond, and the high-rise landscape in Miami Beach may also make such campaigns ineffective.
Weeks ago, as mosquitoes carrying the disease became resistant to a less potent pesticide, Miami-Dade County turned to the more controversial naled. The Miami Herald noted that naled is "toxic not just to the noxious flying parasites, but also to beneficial insects like honey bees, as well as birds, some fish—and people."
The newspaper wrote:
Several studies suggest that long-term exposure to even low levels of naled can have serious health effects for children and infants as well as wildlife, including butterflies and bees, for whom exposure can be lethal. Some studies suggest it might have neurological and developmental effects on human fetuses, including on brain size, echoing the severe consequences that eradication of the Aedes aegypti mosquito that carries the Zika virus is meant to prevent.
"It's essentially a neurotoxin and can result in unborn children in particular having neurodevelopmental problems," Dr. Barry Ryan of Emory University told local station WTXL this week.
WTXL pointed out that the European Union has banned the insecticide.
Meanwhile, National Geographic reported on Friday that "the way those compounds are delivered doesn't fit the latest landscape where the insects are now flourishing--the high-rise hotels and luxury condos of Miami Beach."
Airplanes carrying the insecticides can't get sufficiently low to the ground, for one thing, and the tall buildings in Miami Beach create a sort of wind tunnel, as one expert told the magazine, complicating aerial spraying efforts.
"That makes it more likely that some bugs will be missed by spraying campaigns or get less than a full dose of killing pesticides, allowing them to become resistant," wrote journalist and author Maryn McKenna. "And that scenario could play out not just in Miami but also in the similar Gulf Coast cities where federal health authorities say the disease may land next."
However, the solution to that particular problem--working to ensure mosquitoes on the ground get a "full dose" of the insecticide--may be detrimental in the long run.
As Nichelle Harriott, science and regulatory director at Beyond Pesticides, told the Herald in mid-August: "Widespread application of naled is very troubling. We know it's highly neurotoxic. Studies show that low-dose exposures are problematic over a person's life."
"In cases such as this," she said, "they always say that people are just going to be exposed to small amounts for very short periods. But how long is it going to go on? How long are they going to be spraying? Those exposures do accumulate, and we need to look at those aggregate exposures."
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Whistleblower Accuses USDA of Censorship Over Anti-Pesticide Reports
'Bureaucracies under political pressure from corporate stakeholders routinely shoot the messenger, even if they are wearing a lab coat.'
Oct 29, 2015
A top scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) filed a whistleblower complaint Wednesday, accusing the agency of harassment and retaliation for his work showing harmful effects on monarch butterflies from a class of widely used insecticides known as neonicotinoids, or neonics.
The department reportedly imposed a 14-day suspension (pdf) on Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, a senior research entomologist at the USDA, for publishing an unapproved report manuscript in a science journal on the "non-target effects" of a widely used neonic strain and for travel violations ahead of a presentation on the results to a scientific panel.
"What else is USDA hiding about the health and environmental impacts of pesticides?"
--Gary Ruskin, U.S. Right to Know
According to Lundgren and his supporters, the suspension was just censorship.
"Politics inside USDA have made entomology into a most perilous discipline," said Laura Dumais, staff counsel with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which filed the complaint on Lundgren's behalf.
The Merit Systems Protection Board, a federal civil service tribunal, will hear the case. Lundgren wrote in his complaint:
Since late March, I have been subjected to a sudden but escalating pattern of impediments and disruption of my scientific work, restraints on my ability to communicate with scientific colleagues, as well as the media and a growing professional toll that is making further scientific work in ARS untenable. This abrupt onset of actions undoubtedly appears to have been prompted by the scientific activities that are supposed to be specifically safeguarded and encouraged under the USDA Scientific Integrity Policy.
"It is USDA policy that political suppression and manipulation of science are not to be tolerated, but it is empty rhetoric," Dumais added.
Neonics have long been linked to dramatic population losses for butterflies, bees, and other pollinators, which environmental experts say threatens food security.
Lundgren and other researchers also previously found that neonics on the whole did not increase crop yields for farmers--casting yet more doubts on the supposed efficacy of the controversial products.
The case also "raises questions about whether USDA is suppressing other research adverse to the interests of the agrichemical industry," said Gary Ruskin, co-director of consumer advocacy group U.S. Right to Know. "Is this an isolated incident or part of a larger pattern? What else is USDA hiding about the health and environmental impacts of pesticides?"
As PEER executive director Jeff Ruch said on Wednesday, "Dr. Lundgren's case underscores why legal protections for government scientists are sorely needed. Bureaucracies under political pressure from corporate stakeholders routinely shoot the messenger, even if they are wearing a lab coat."
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