Just when you thought it was safe to eat your fruits and veggies....
Produce growers, other ag groups file opening brief in case against EPA's chlorpyrifos ban
A powerful contingent of agricultural and produce grower groups this week filed the latest salvo in a years-long battle over the pesticide chlorpyrifos, seeking to reverse a new rule banning the chemical from use in U.S. food production.
The move comes after health and environmental advocates successfully forced the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last year to announce a ban on the use of chlorpyrifos in farming due to scientific evidence showing the chemical damages children’s brains.
Calling chlorpyrifos a “pest control tool that is critical” for growing crops, the coalition of 19 state and U.S. food and agricultural groups and one chemical company on Tuesday filed their opening brief against the EPA in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The plaintiffs include the Red River Sugarbeet Growers Association, the U.S. Beet Sugar Association, American Farm Bureau Federation, and other grower groups representing sugar, soybean, wheat, cotton and fruit and vegetable producer organizations.
The groups allege that the EPA action to ban chlorpyrifos was “unlawful” and lacks a scientific basis. The petition states that growers face a “concrete and particularized” and “actual or imminent” injury because of the ban, and notes that the chemical is particularly important to growers of cherries, sugarbeets and soybeans.
The EPA has until July 22 to file a response to the groups’ brief, and declined to comment on the grower group allegations laid out in the brief.
Read the rest of the story in The New Lede.
Anyone caught on and find it odd that only registrants (chemical manufacturers) are able to produce data and studies with a scientific basis and that truly independent scientists data, no matter how good the study and data are, are dismissed, usually as “junk science”?
Agriculture has changed over the past 50 years with respect to number of small-scale farmers being replaced by large-scale farms contracted with massive corporations. Agriculture came well before herbicides did, so growing crops can be done without chemicals, but the due to the large size of agricultural monocultures now makes that prospect seem like an impossibility as the risk a pest poses now can result in massive financial loss.
We have created a situation where we are more or less reliant on chemicals. However, that is no excuse to not change the current agricultural paradigm.