Getting rid of residues - Pesticides

Vegetarian Times, Feb, 1995 by Steve Lustgarden

FIRST, THE GOOD NEWS. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced a tentative agreement to settle a lawsuit brought against the agency over its mishandling of the Delaney Clause, a 1958 federal provision that prohibits processed foods from containing any trace of cancer-causing pesticides. The EPA has not fully enforced the clause, allowing processed foods to contain pesticide residues that pose what the agency considers only a negligible health risk, defined as one extra cancer case than would normally occur per million people. Under the agreement between the EPA and the groups who sued--led by the environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council, and including the state of California--within two years the EPA will prohibit three dozen pesticides that cause cancer in laboratory animals from being used on crops destined to become processed foods.

Now the bad news. Two of the three pesticide reform proposals before Congress (the Lehman-Bliley bill and the Clinton administration's bill, created by the EPA) would repeal the Delaney Clause and replace it with the negligible risk standard. If either bill is enacted, the settlement--and the requirement to remove carcinogens from processed foods--would become null. "That's the irony of this whole thing," says Jay Feldman, executive director of the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, based in Washington, D.C. "What the EPA is agreeing to on one hand it may strike [down] with the other."

While applauding the settlement, Feldman says that agrichemical interests will now redouble their efforts to weaken the nation's pesticide laws and kill the Delaney Clause: "There is no question that this lawsuit gives impetus to their cause because it attaches a sense of urgency to their position. The court decision becomes a feeding frenzy for the industry campaign to fight Delaney."

Al Heier, public information officer for EPA, agrees that the settlement will motivate agrichemical interests to step up the pressure to kill the Delaney Clause. But he points out, "if Congress is no more prone to legislate than they have been in the past--we've been working on pesticide reform legislation since 1992 and reform hasn't happened yet--this settlement will have quite an impact."

According to Feldman, the only pesticide-reform bill worthy of support is the Pesticide Food Safety Act of 1994 (H.R. 4091), which was introduced by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). It would uphold the zero-tolerance standard set by the Delaney Clause. In the final analysis, says Feldman, "the only way this settlement will be a boon for public health protection is if citizens put pressure on the EPA to ensure its enforcement and on Congress to preserve the principles of the Delaney Clause."