Proposed food safety laws are starved for scientific merit - controversial policies on food chemicals used to preserve food - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 1, 1993 | by Elizabeth Whelan

The Clinton administration recently outlined a major overhaul of the nation's pesticide and food safety laws. The proposal takes us five steps forward and 50 steps back in our quest to keep our food supply plentiful, varied, safe and affordable. The legislation offers something to please and aggravate all parties in the pesticide debate.

On the plus side, the administration plans to scrap the anachronistic Delaney Clause. This 1958 legislation requires the banning of any food chemical that in any dose causes cancer when ingested by any laboratory animal - without consideration of the extent of human exposure or the benefits of the chemical. Ever more sensitive analytic techniques have allowed us to find residues at minuscule levels, while experiments using larger and larger megadoses find cancer in rodents. As a result, when the Delaney Clause has been interpreted literally, an increasing number of pesticides have become vulnerable to a ban.

A recent federal court ruling declared that there is no flexibility in the Delaney Clause. So it became obvious to the Clinton administration that to avoid immediate chaos in agricultural production, Delaney had to go. In place of the Delaney straitjacket, Clinton is proposing that pesticides with negligible risk be spared banishment to the graveyard of chemicals.

The radical environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council (which orchestrated the great Alar apple hoax of 1989), are outraged that the Delaney Clause will be snuffed out. They reject the views of mainstream science that traces of animal carcinogens play no known role in human cancers and that nature itself abounds with chemicals known to cause cancer in laboratory animals.

But then there is the darker side of the Clinton food safety proposal - one that pleases the radical environmentalists but should concern any American.

Carol Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has vowed to phase out consideration of the economic benefits of pesticides in determining their approval. She also has made a commitment to move in the direction of abandoning the use of all pesticides, starting with the most dangerous.

Her plan is built on two premises that have no scientific merit: that pesticides currently in use are not necessary and that scientific consensus says pesticide residues in food pose a health hazard, particularly to children.

First, American farmers use about 1 billion pounds of 600 pesticides each year. Pesticides are expensive, and we can logically conclude that the farmers use them for a purpose.

Thus, if pesticides are phased out, there will be consequences. Given that farmers use pesticides to decrease damage by insects and to increase crop yield, the obvious consequences will be less food, more bugs and higher prices.

Second, there is no scientific consensus that the current regulated use of pesticides poses a health hazard. In press releases, the Clinton team frequently points to a report issued in June by the National Academy of Sciences, claiming that the report justifies a move against pesticides because it said they are harmful to children. But the academy's report concluded no such thing - and indeed, simply raised questions about the need for more information about tolerance levels in children and about the types of food children eat.

About 80 percent of the produce tested by the Food and Drug Administration contains no measurable level of pesticide; about 19 percent contains residues well within the conservative legal limits; and 1 percent exceeds the limits (usually because no limits have been established for the crop), though still does not pose a health threat. The Clinton administration is proposing that we dismantle an agricultural system that produces the most enviable food supply in the world to solve a health problem that does not exist.

Over the past decade, Americans have heard strident calls from the zero risk" environmental groups, which make no effort to disguise their contempt for free enterprise, agri-business and what to them is an obscenity - industrial profits. Those who shout "cancer" literally at the drop of a rat want us to retreat to "natural" farming.

Americans also have heard the arguments in defense of the pesticide manufacturers, who quite understandably want to protect their own business interests.

But now that the Clinton administration has given this regulatory wake-up call, it is time (actually long overdue) to hear from American farmers, who could vividly describe what would happen if Washington took away the tools of their trade, and from American scientists, who could document that residues pose no health hazard and testify that, scientifically and medically speaking, the White House emperor has no clothes.

Elizabeth Whelan is president of the American Council on Science and Health.