Farm worker groups sue EPA to stop pesticide use

Having failed to add new pesticide controls to a House farm bill, farm worker and environmental groups are trying the courts to block what they say is a particularly hazardous chemical now used on a variety of crops.

EarthJustice, Farmworker Justice, United Farm Workers of America and the Natural Resources Defense Council argue in a lawsuit that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is violating the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act by allowing the use of chlorpyrifos on farm fields.

{mosads}The suit was filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

A neurotoxin, chlorpyrifos is banned from indoor use. Acute symptoms include headache, nausea and diarrhea. Exposure to chlorpyrifos in the womb can damage a fetus’s intellectual development.

“It was designed to affect the nervous system of insects, but it affects the nervous system of humans just as badly,” said Dr. Routt Reigart, a professor of pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina. Reigart was part of a press conference yesterday discussing the lawsuit.

An EPA fact sheet dated February 2002 states: “provided that risk mitigation measures are adopted, chlorpyrifos fits into its own ‘risk cup’ — [its] individual risks are within acceptable levels.”

The groups involved with the lawsuit also were backing several provisions included in a farm bill authored by Reps. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Ron Kind (D-Wis.) that was offered as a substitute to the farm bill written by the House Agriculture Committee.

The debate over the two rival bills centered on how each treated payments to farmers. Another difference was that the Flake-Kind bill would have also required more complete reporting of pesticide use in agriculture. It would also have provided money to help growers use safer methods to raise crops.

Chlorpyrifos is used on a variety of crops including, corn, cotton, wheat, oranges and apples.

The House approved the committee’s version of the farm bill. Backers of the pesticide provisions still hope they are included in the Senate version of the measure.

The EPA found that the pesticide residues in food or drinking water “do not pose risk concerns.”

Shelley Davis, deputy director of Farmworker Justice, said that “by refusing to ban agricultural use of this toxic pesticide, EPA is saying the health of farm workers and rural children doesn’t matter.”