Let’s be honest. It is entirely fair to say that the Environmental Protection Agency has a checkered history when it comes to following its rules to register pesticides.
EPA’s registration process determines whether a pesticide should enter the marketplace and whether approved pesticides will be classified as general use or restricted use. General use pesticides can be used by anyone while restricted use pesticides require a license because they are more dangerous.
EPA is legally required to make registration decisions solely using best scientific practices. But that is where EPA runs off the rails, occasionally putting the demands of Big Ag and politicians ahead of scientific judgment. At EPA, sadly, there are too many examples of “rules are meant to be broken.”
A couple of current EPA pesticide cases are illustrative of the problem — EPA’s attempts to cancel the registration of chlorpyrifos and register dicamba.
Environmentalists have been in the courts trying to get EPA to kill the registration for chlorpyrifos ever since an EPA preliminary health risk assessment in 2011 found young children and babies exposed to the pesticide potentially face negative neurological impacts. The EPA followed up that with stronger warnings in 2014 and 2016. And kept chlorpyrifos’ registration.
In April of 2019, a federal appeals court gave the EPA 90 days to ban chlorpyrifos. That deadline came and went with nothing happening.
Finally in May of 2021 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit gave EPA 60 days to either ban the pesticides or establish chlorpyrifos tolerances that are scientifically considered safe for workers.
EPA decided to cancel registration of chlorpyrifos. The agency did so without considering potential restricted use tolerances for workers. By failing due diligence, EPA has made a mess of it.
In February of 2022, the American Farm Bureau Federation and other farm organizations sued. Last November the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled EPA failed its obligations:
“The EPA had to act quickly. But a short deadline is no excuse for zeroing in on a single solution to the exclusion of others. Its too-narrow view of its own authority kept it from “consider[ing] an important aspect of the problem.”
The bottom line is that chlorpyrifos usage is restored for the 2024 growing season.
EPA’s handling of dicamba is also something of a train wreck. In 2020,the agency registered three dicamba products: Bayer’s XtendiMax, BASF’s Engenia and Sygnenta’s Tavium. But in doing so a Center for Biological Diversity lawsuit claimed EPA ran afoul of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.
Earlier this month Arizona District Court Judge David Bury granted the plaintiffs summary judgment, ruling EPA violated public input rules in approving the three dicamba-based weedkillers.
“The EPA is wrong that the OTT dicamba applications in 2020 did not meet the ‘new use’ definition under 40 C.F.R. § 152.3, which means: ‘any additional use pattern that would result in a significant increase in the level of exposure, or a change in the route of exposure, to the active ingredient of man or other organisms.’ Just like the 2016, as amended in 2018, registrations did, the 2020 registrations met this definition. The 2020 registrations required notice by publication in the Federal Register and public comment under FIFRA.”
EPA showed a stunning disregard for public involvement in relying on vacated dicamba registrations to decide that Bayer, BASF, and Sygenta’s over-the-top dicamba formulations did not need “new use” scrutiny.
Beginning to see a pattern here? The EPA pesticide registration process is flawed and needs an overhaul to ensure public safety.
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