Dangerous Delays
EPA Misses Its Own Deadlines for Examining Wildlife, Human Health Impacts from Common Pesticides
We’d hoped that 2015 was going to be the year that the Environmental Protection Agency finally took a close look at how some of the most commonly used pesticides threaten people and wildlife. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
But it needs to, and here’s why. The last times the agency fully analyzed the threats posed by glyphosate, imidacloprid and atrazine were the years 1993, 1994 and 2003, respectively. Since then, an abundance of research has demonstrated that the current safety standards in place for these chemicals are not protective of human and environmental health.
The agency pledged to complete risk assessments in 2015 for all three — regarded as some of the most controversial and commonly used pesticides in the United States. These reviews are critical to understanding the risk these pesticides pose to people, wildlife and the environment. We have a right to know what those risks are.
The EPA is required to re-register pesticides every 15 years to ensure that new information can be analyzed and incorporated into regulatory standards.
But it’s been 22 years since glyphosate was last registered, and during that time its annual use in the United States has ballooned more than 10-fold, from around 20 million pounds to more than 280 million pounds. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) has determined that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen. So we’re using more than 10 times the amount of glyphosate that was originally accounted for, and the EPA has still not analyzed the results of the WHO report. In fact, the U.S. government regards glyphosate as so safe that it doesn’t even test for its presence in food or water, as is common with most other pesticides.
At the same time, the EPA is twiddling its thumbs on imidacloprid, and bees are dying off at an unprecedented rate. For almost a decade, imidacloprid and other neonicotinoids have been implicated in bee mortality and reduced ability of bees to pollinate. Bee pollination is required for the production of 1 in 3 bites of our food supply. And it isn’t just bees at risk: Researchers have found that a single seed that contained imidacloprid was enough to kill a songbird, implicating neonicotinoids in the decline of bird populations throughout the world.
The second-most widely applied pesticide in the United States, the highly toxic atrazine, is one of the most controversial pesticides in use today. It’s harmful to amphibians at extremely low doses, widely regarded as unsafe at any concentration and already banned throughout Europe. Yet its use continues here at home. In fact, just eight months ago the EPA approved a new product that contains atrazine.
Dangerous pesticides have become massively overused in our industrial food system and we urgently need EPA, the regulatory body in charge of pesticide regulation, to keep pace with the emerging science on their risks in order to protect people and the environment. Refusing to examine a problem doesn’t make it go away, and delaying much-needed analysis only prolongs the damage that’s being done. EPA, will 2016 be the year you finally step up?
