(Beyond Pesticides, January 24, 2025) Based on data collected from government sources and independent monitoring, a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Connecticut finds that 46% of Connecticut waterway samples are contaminated with levels of the neonicotinoid insecticide, imidacloprid—one of the most widely used insecticides in the United States on lawn and golf courses.

The authors relied on federal data from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), state-level data from Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT-DEEP), and a small-scale data collection study by the Clean Rivers Project funded by the nonprofit Pollinator Pathway, Inc. In their report, Neonicotinoids in Connecticut Waters: Surface Water, Groundwater, and Threats to Aquatic Ecosystems, the researchers provide the most comprehensive view to date of neonicotinoid levels in Connecticut and offer critical recommendations for future testing within the state and nationally, given glaring data gaps.

It is important to note that the authors acknowledged early in the report the “abandonment” of Integrated Pest Management in “the use of neonicotinoids has coincided with and been implicated in the decline of many non-target species of insects, in particular pollinators such as bees () and monarch butterflies.”

They point out that the use of this systemic pesticide, typically incorporated into seeds and then integrated into the vascular system of plants and expressed through their pollen, nectar, and guttation droplets, constitutes the “abandonment” of a basic principle of Integrated Pest Management (IPM), “an approach predicated on minimizing the use of chemical pesticides in favor of pest monitoring and pesticide application only when necessary (Metcalf and Luckmann, 1994).”

IPM has been highly criticized as a land management system because it lacks a uniform definition, is not limited to least-toxic pesticides, and provides no enforcement mechanism, key elements incorporated in organic certification. (See Beyond Pesticides’ Parks for a Sustainable Future program—a novel initiative that works with land managers across the nation looking to move to organic practices and principles that replace chemical-intensive practices with pest prevention and management strategies, incorporating soil science and the natural cycling of nutrients.)

Advocates, organic farmers, farmworkers, physicians, and community leaders alike welcome science-based and criteria-driven solutions to avoid pesticide industry greenwashing or co-optation of climate solutions to perpetuate the use of toxic products, as has been made evident with the failure of IPM to eliminate hazardous pesticide use, climate-smart agriculture and carbon markets (See Daily News here), and regenerative agriculture. (See Daily News here.)

Background and Methods

The three authors of this study, Steven J. Presley, PhD, Cristopher R. Perkins, MS, and Michael R. Willig, PhD, are research specialists in environmental science, biology, and ecology at the Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering and Institute of the Environment at University of Connecticut. The existing data, as referenced above, comes from a variety of federal and state-level agencies, however there was also some original data gathering.

CT-DEEP collected data on macroinvertebrates along the Norwalk River between 1989 and 2020. USGS data was collected from October 2001 to January 2024 testing for imidacloprid levels in 600 surface water and 62 groundwater samples from across the state. Surface and ground water testing has not been consistent over the decades on record, leading to support for the 2024 Clean Rivers Project in the southeastern region of the state.

The goal of this small-scale study was “to detect and quantify the presence of six neonicotinoids (i.e., nitenpyram, thiamethoxam, clothianidin, imidacloprid, acetamiprid, and thiacloprid) in surface waters adjacent to large expanses of manicured lawns such as golf courses, which commonly use neonicotinoids to control pests that damage turf.” (See The Clean Rivers Project Neonicotinoid Data section on pages 8 to 9 of the report for more information.)

Funding for this data gathering, particularly the 2024 Clean Rivers Project, came from various sources including a grassroots fundraiser led by CT Pollinator Pathway and contributions from Sustainable CT, National Resources Defense Council, and Friends of the Earth. Norwalk River Watershed Association and East Norwalk Blue are credited with gathering water quality samples for the 2024 Clean Rivers Project. (See Acknowledgments section on page 3 of the report for more details.)

The UConn authors focus on imidacloprid concentrations in aquatic systems for numerous reasons documented in the report. Imidacloprid was the only neonicotinoid detected in the 2024 Clean Rivers Project, the only neonicotinoid for which USGS has publicly available data, the “single most commonly used insecticide in the world,” and an expansive listing of uses across agricultural and non-agricultural contexts.

Aquatic systems were chosen given the importance of marine ecosystems for the New England economy. They were also selected since EPA has acute and chronic benchmarks for freshwater aquatic invertebrate exposure to insecticides.

The researchers identify five main goals for their report:

1. “Determine long-term and seasonal patterns of the frequency of imidacloprid occurrence in surface and ground waters of Connecticut;
2. Determine seasonal variation in imidacloprid concentration in Connecticut waters;
3. Determine spatiotemporal variation in imidacloprid concentration in Connecticut surface water and groundwater;
4. Leverage long-term sampling from a site in the Connecticut River from northern Connecticut (Thompsonville) as a case study to evaluate long-term patterns in imidacloprid concentration that reflect impacts from a “light urban” region that contains urban, forested, and agricultural areas in Massachusetts that flow south into Connecticut; and,
5. Use the Norwalk River, a watershed with relatively little agriculture, as a case study to evaluate long-term trends in imidacloprid concentration from nonagricultural outdoor sources, and long-term trends in aquatic macroinvertebrate richness and abundance.”

Main Conclusions and Recommendations

Long-Term and Seasonal Patterns: Frequency of Imidacloprid Occurrence

Researchers find that the frequency of imidacloprid detection in Connecticut waterways increased in surface waters but “show[ed] no significant temporal trend in groundwaters.” Beginning after the 2012 sampling period, “46% of samples collected since 2012 have detected imidacloprid, with at least half of the samples testing positive for imidacloprid during 5 of the past 9 years.” It is important to note that groundwater testing for neonicotinoids has not been tested since 2017, which exacerbates the researchers’ concern over “the ability of neonicotinoids to persist for extended periods of time when not exposed to sunlight.”

See Daily News here for related analysis of pesticide contamination in water wells in Wisconsin for lessons to be learned on improving groundwater detection of pesticides.

Seasonal Variation in Imidacloprid Concentration

Similar to the previous section’s results, imidacloprid detection in Connecticut surface water corresponds with the “seasonal applications of neonicotinoids for agriculture and for turf grass management (e.g., lawns and golf courses.)” Average imidacloprid concentrations in June and July are found to be “six times greater than the USEPA freshwater aquatic chronic benchmark.”

Groundwater sampling is deemed “insufficient” to determine seasonal trends.

Where in Connecticut is Imidacloprid Most Concentrated?

Researchers find imidacloprid concentrations increasing closer to Connecticut coastal waterways. “In contrast, there is no significant pattern of imidacloprid concentration going from east to west in the state, there are no significant differences between water sources (surface versus ground water), and there is no interaction between water source and time or between water source and space,” the researchers write. They suggest that the concentration of imidacloprid in the eastern parts of the state “is greatest in agricultural and suburban areas, and the proportion of area represented by the combination of agriculture and suburban developments increases toward the coast, with northern areas often being highly forested, which is a habitat type in which the use of neonicotinoids is uncommon.”

The researchers raise concerns that groundwater along the Connecticut coast “has rarely been tested for imidacloprid.”

The Thompsonville Case Study

The USGS site in Thompsonville tested for imidacloprid concentration from water wells in the Connecticut River Basin, finding “no significant temporal change in groundwaters, but with decreasing mean imidacloprid concentration in surface waters.” Researchers attribute these contrasting results with several factors including,

• Samples were only collected in 2003 and 2017;
• The first year of sampling incorporated skewed data that was otherwise corrected for each consecutive year (2013-2023) for EPA chronic benchmark criteria; and,
• Reliance on inconsistent access to private wells for groundwater data

The Norwalk River Case Study

“Importantly, the 2024 data from the Clean Rivers Project represent the only targeted sampling for neonicotinoids in Connecticut, with water samples taken specifically when (July and August) and where (near manicured turf grasses) one would expect to find high concentrations of neonicotinoids,” the researchers reflect on the implications of data gathered through the 2024 Clean Rivers Project. “This suggests that targeted sampling of areas (e.g., waters near row crops such as corn and soybeans, near golf courses, or near suburban areas with manicured lawns) during the summer months is more likely to reflect the current presence of neonicotinoids than are the data that are currently provided by the USGS.”

Upon reflection of the various datasets, researchers arrive at the following recommendations that can set the tone for neonicotinoid insecticide regulations in the state of Connecticut moving forward:

• “Execute synoptic sampling (coordinated sampling in space and time) of neonicotinoid concentrations and macroinvertebrate abundance and richness;
• Expand the geographic sampling to include little studied areas of Connecticut (e.g., northwestern and eastern portions of the state);
• Increase the testing of ground water and well water for neonicotinoids, as these water sources are under-represented in the available data and may relate more intimately to human health concerns;
• Amplify testing to include samples of sediment, which may represent areas of contaminant accumulation and exposure for some benthic species;
• Enlarge the suite of neonicotinoids whose concentrations are being monitored throughout the state, including newer generation compounds such as cycloxaprid, imidaclothiz, paichongding, sulfoxaflor, guadipyr, and flupyradifurone;
• Implement before and after studies that focus on known pesticide application periods and major rainfall events to gather data that are relevant to possible acute levels of neonicotinoids;
• Explore the extent of sub-lethal effects of neonicotinoids on insects that include characteristics related to demographics such as emergence times, size at emergence, and proportion of individuals that reach maturity;
• Consider banning the use of seeds treated with neonicotinoids;
• Recommend the use of alternatives to neonicotinoids, including biological control and natural products, where feasible;
• Where non-toxic alternatives are not feasible, recommend the use of non-neonicotinoid insecticides such as chlorantraniliprole, which have low toxicity to bees, though they are toxic to aquatic invertebrates and butterflies; and,
• Conduct testing of effects of neonicotinoids on aquatic larvae in areas that are used for shellfish production. Many shellfish producers seed their oysters in the brackish areas near the mouth of large rivers, including the Quinnipiac River.”

Environmental and public health professionals resonate with these recommendations as they take to heart the importance of applying the precautionary principle in the regulatory review process, while simultaneously proposing crucial starting points for additional future research on neonicotinoid contamination, sampling sources (i.e. well water and groundwater sources), more aquatic animal populations such as shellfish, and factors such as “sublethal” exposure or accounting for recent rainfall.

Neonicotinoid Regulations in Review

Policymakers, by the consistent and decades-long urging of dynamic coalitions and communities within the state, have already taken strides in protecting the public from petrochemical-based pesticide exposure. Branford, Greenwich, Stamford, and Norwalk are several examples of the cities that have moved toward organic land management and/or pesticide bans in the spirit of protecting children’s public health. In the past several legislative sessions, there have been bills in the state legislature calling for restricting neonicotinoid insecticides. (See here previous testimony from 2024 legislative session submitted to Joint Environment Committee.) Beyond Pesticides will continue to monitor for future actions this session.

The U.S. regulatory review process for uses of neonicotinoid insecticides has failed to consider numerous studies linking neonicotinoid insecticide exposure to adverse health effects, including breast cancer, nervous system impacts, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), neurological impacts, heightened risk of obesity, and transferability between mother and fetus. Neonicotinoid applications have been linked to elevated hazards to honeybee populations. Neonicotinoid-treated seeds have been linked to precipitous declines in bird and monarch butterfly populations. Meanwhile, studies have exposed the shortcomings of EPA’s ecological risk assessment process and the broader pesticide risk assessment process.

The chemical Industry will continue to intervene in the regulatory process, as was made evident last month by investigative reporters from Canada’s National Observer, which found pesticide manufacturer Bayer colluded with environmental and public health regulators to reverse Canada’s proposed neonicotinoid insecticide ban originally introduced in 2018. (See Daily News here.)

Take Action

Several states, including Vermont and New York in 2024, have taken actions to restrict the use of neonicotinoid insecticides across certain uses. Advocates expect more bills to be introduced in various state legislatures this year to address the biodiversity, public health, and climate implications of the continuous use of neonicotinoids, neonicotinoid-treated seeds, and systemic pesticides.

See recent Daily News here on the impacts of neonicotinoid insecticides on monarch butterfly populations in North America. Take action today by telling the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to finalize its proposed listing of monarchs as threatened.

For a deeper dive, see Poisoned Waterways: The same pesticide that is killing bees is destroying life in the nation’s streams, rivers, and lakes.

Source: University of Connecticut

(Beyond Pesticides, January 23, 2025) According to reporting by Bangor Daily News, “Starting in 2025, the Mi’kmaq Nation, [Upland Grassroots], [University of Virginia], the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and Central Aroostook Soil and Water Conservation District will use a four-year, $1.6 million EPA grant to continue hemp planting at [the former] Loring [Air Force Base] and testing potential ways to extract PFAS [per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances] from harvested hemp.” This grant will support an existing initiative led by members of the Mi’kmaq Nation to remediate this contaminated Superfund-designated land purchased from the U.S. government in 2009 based on interviews of the Nation’s Vice Chief Richard Silliboy.  

PFAS, colloquially known as “forever chemicals,” persist in various petrochemical-based pesticides, chemicals, and other consumer products. Beyond Pesticides, in coordination with national coalitions and local communities, continues to act against the proliferation of PFAS and PFAS-contaminated products through grassroots organizing and litigation.

The use and associated public and environmental exposure to PFAS as pesticide active ingredients in pesticide products and a wide range of consumer products (including containers holding pesticides targeting mosquitoes and sewage sludge fertilizers) represent a grave threat as a result of their use in homes, emergency rooms, health care facilities, schools, and lawncare. The contamination extends to homes and gardens, food, water, and soil. PFAS compounds have been found to contaminate water and irrigation sources, and soils themselves — often through the use of fertilizers made from so-called “biosludge” (biosolids) from local waste treatment plants where PFAS active ingredients can end up. In addition, run-off from land treated with PFAS active ingredients, these treatment plants may discharge millions of gallons of wastewater into waterways, contaminating them; current waste and water treatment generally does not eliminate PFAS compounds from the treated effluent water.

Tribal Leadership on PFAS Remediation in Maine

In partnership with professionals from the University of Virginia and Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, Vice Chief Silliboy and tribal member Norman Bernard began planting hemp seeds in 2022 “at the start of a research project studying whether hemp can extract PFAS from soil.” Silliboy is a co-founder of Upland Grassroots, the community-led organization leading the cleanup effort. Through this organization, hemp plants were planted on small plots and tested for PFAS at the Connecticut station.

“Of the 28 PFAS varieties identified in the soil, 10 were found in the harvested hemp plants, according to the group’s research,” says the reporting by Bangor Daily News. (See here for published study in Environmental Science: Advances.) Despite preliminary success in sequestering some forms of PFAS to hemp, the group now must contend with how to properly dispose of the contaminated plants without contributing to landfills or leading to eventual exposure in future generations. The University of Virginia, represented by chemical engineering professor Bryan Berger, PhD, is poised to release data in early 2025 as part of an ongoing scientific initiative testing a method that could remove PFAS directly from the contaminated plants. Given the $1.6 million EPA grant, community members and scientific partners alike appear optimistic at this juncture.

Decision-makers in Maine, both at the state-level and county level, have demonstrated leadership in passing legislation and programs that take seriously the existential threat of toxic petrochemical-based and PFAS-contaminated pesticides, fertilizers, and chemicals in a way that is not present in other states, nor at the federal level.

In 2022, Maine became the first state in the nation to prohibit PFAS from pesticide and fertilizer products by 2030. (See Daily News here.) In order to meet this goal, the legislature established a PFAS Fund to provide compensation for commercial farmers whose health, business, and land have been impacted by contamination through a $70 million federal-state funding pool over the next five years. (See Daily News here for more coverage.) The first application was filed earlier this year in March, and local reporting from Maine Public Radio finds that $1 million in compensation was rolled out by June 17, 2024.

PFAS Health and Environmental Threats

There are numerous environmental and public health impacts of forever chemicals, underscoring the necessity for transformational change of food and land management systems.

In a recent commentary published by scientists and lawyers in Environmental Health Perspectives, the authors speak to the existential threat that fluorinated molecules, including PFAS, pose to environmental health. “The long-term impacts of using mixtures of extremely persistent chemicals on potentially hundreds of millions of acres of US land every year is, to us, a cause for concern,” the authors write. PFAS or related compounds are included in 70% of pesticides (those with a fluorine–carbon atom bond, which is among the strongest ever created) introduced to the global market from 2015 to 2020, according to a review paper published in January 2022 in Environmental Pollution. Earlier this year, EPA announced standards for six PFAS (there are over 12,000 types and only 32 detectable in federal labs) under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), marking the first time since 1996 that EPA has regulated new chemicals with the recognition that there are no safe levels of exposure due to persistence and bioaccumulation in humans, wildlife, and ecosystems. (See Daily News here.)

According to public health and environmental advocates, this decision is a long time coming, given U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) data released in a 2023 study published in Environment International indicating “that at least one PFAS could be detected in about 45% of U.S. drinking-water samples.” (See Daily News here.) Yet still, there are various limitations to existing environmental statutes as made evident in April 2024 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit vacated EPA action, pursuant to Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), ordering Texas-based manufacturer Inhance Technologies, L.L.C. to stop producing plastic containers that leach PFAS into various products that use the company’s containers, including pesticides. The court ruled that EPA used the wrong TSCA section to pursue action, however in the court opinion authored by Circuit Judge Cory T. Wilson, it was confirmed that the agency must “weigh the costs to businesses and the overall economy before shutting down an ongoing manufacturing process,” effectively stating that financial concerns of industry usurp public wellbeing. (See Daily News here.)

The implications of failing to regulate PFAS are staggering given existing peer-reviewed science on adverse health effects.

Intrepid 2F, one of the most widely used pesticides in California as of 2023, was found to contain harmful PFAS levels based on an investigation led by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and Center for Biological Diversity. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) determined that 98% of Americans have some level of PFAS in their bloodstream, with studies reporting PFAS compounds are detectable in infants, children, and pregnant women. (See Daily News here.) A 2022 study published in Environmental Science and Technology finds PFAS regularly contaminates the hydrological ecosystem, leading to rainwater absorption of PFAS chemicals. (See Daily News here.)

Prenatal exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, including PFAS, may increase liver injury and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) risk for child patients, based on peer-reviewed literature published in Environmental Health and led by an international team of researchers from various medical institutions, including Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Columbia University. (See Daily News here.) Prenatal exposure to forever chemicals can also increase cardiometabolic risk (aka the risk of heart diseases and metabolic disorders) in adolescence and later in life, according to a Brown University-led study published in Environment International (2021). (See Daily News here.)

For more coverage and analysis of science and policy solutions, see the dedicated Daily News section on PFAS.

Call to Action

PFAS has been found in a vast array of products, including containers holding pesticides targeting mosquitoes (See Daily News here) and sewage sludge fertilizers (See Daily News here.). While communities across the nation brace for a significant drop off in federal engagement on PFAS, pesticides, and chemical harms, there are various opportunities for engagement, led by scientists, farmers, health professionals, and advocates dedicated to protecting public health and the environment.

In June 2024, PEER filed a lawsuit against the EPA on behalf of a group of ranchers and farmers in Texas harmed by biosolids contaminated with PFAS. (See Daily News here.) This lawsuit stands on the precedent set by a 2023 settlement in which DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva were ordered to pay $1.185 billion dollars to local communities across the U.S. to cover the cost of PFAS remediation and monitoring for their public drinking water systems. (See Daily News here.)

Beyond Pesticides, represented by Richman Law & Policy, filed suit against The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company and GreenTechnologies, LLC for allegedly misleading consumers on the hazardous nature of their fertilizer products, which contain PFAS-contaminated sewage sludge. The complaint cites test results showing PFAS residues in the companies’ fertilizers and numerous scientific studies on the adverse effects of PFAS to public health, wildlife, and pollinators. (See Daily News here and associated press release here.)

There are numerous actions that you can take if you are concerned about the threat of PFAS. In 2024, the Center for Food Safety, on behalf of twelve other petitioners (including environmental, farmer, and farmworker groups), filed a petition to EPA telling the agency to prevent PFAS contamination through pesticides through five key actions. See here to take action and learn more.

See here to tell Congress to pass bipartisan bills (Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act and the Healthy H2O Act) to protect farmers and rural communities from PFAS contamination in their drinking water and soil. See here for PFAS prohibition bill introduced in Maryland (SB 345) based on last year’s unsuccessful push. (See here for previous Action of the Week.)

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Source: Bangor Daily News

(Beyond Pesticides, January 22, 2025) A study published in Nature Scientific Reports in December 2024 sheds light on how people value the benefits of reducing or eliminating pesticide exposures. The study, based on economic concepts, is a meta-analysis of studies that have attempted to discern what that value is in monetary terms. This study shows the difficulty in gleaning from the existing literature an assignment of true value of social costs associated with pesticide contamination and poisoning, however, was able to glean several points of interest:

• People’s “willingness to pay” (WTP) is higher for health benefits than ecological ones.
• In studies that included pesticide risks associated with cancer, the social cost (WTP) tripled.
• People’s WTP is higher to prevent or ameliorate chronic diseases than to treat or avoid acute exposures.
• If the study did not specify a pesticide type—even general categories such as herbicide, insecticide and fungicide, and most studies fell into this category—the WTP is significantly higher.
• In ecosystem terms, use of the term “biodiversity” results in higher WTPs compared to other aspects such as groundwater or aquatic organism health.
• Consumers are more risk-averse than farmers.
• The higher the income, the higher the WTP.

Social cost is distinguished from the cost of externalities, such as water contamination cleanup, morbidity and mortality, damages, lost pollination and more. The authors equate the “willingness to pay” (WTP) with the “social cost of pesticides.” In behavioral economics, WTP is the maximum price a buyer is willing to pay for a product or service. Social costs are the personal costs to an individual for the actions he or she performs, such as making a product, plus the externalized costs to everyone else—in this case the damage to human and ecosystem health. The terms are based on an underlying assumption that people will pay more for things they value more, and that a measure of how much people are willing to pay for mitigating or preventing pesticide damage is reflective of the degree of concern society assigns to the hazards and risks of pesticides compared to their benefits.

The authors, from The Netherlands and Canada, faced enormous heterogeneity in the literature they were analyzing because there are few commonalities in methodology, number of participants, or even specification of particular pesticides among previous studies. In fact, the authors state, “The main conclusion is that there exists no single global value estimate for the social costs of pesticide use [and] there is widespread variation in existing value estimates.” The best the authors could do, given the inconsistencies in their data, was to estimate the average global cost of pesticide use at $51 per person per year. That is, taking the entire world population, that is how much humanity is willing to pay to reduce the risks of pesticide exposures annually.

This figure cannot be more than a ballpark guess. The U.S. and Europe, where most of the studies were conducted, were willing to pay more than countries like Vietnam, but given the very wide disparities of both money and information globally, the average is almost meaningless.

But there are deeper assumptions in economics. One is that all players have access to all the relevant information. This is not the case with respect to pesticides. The authors note that “most chemicals used in agriculture do not meet international safety standards, and are in fact highly toxic to humans and the environment” according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. However, this knowledge is not necessarily reflected in the economic behavior of consumers and farmers. Pesticide companies have far more knowledge than their customers about the toxicity of their products, and they exploit this asymmetry avidly, creating yet another economic problem: “moral hazard.”

Last August, Beyond Pesticides analyzed a study showing that pesticide labels fail to convey the hazards and risks of pesticide exposure, and that this failure affects users’ willingness to pay for less toxic products. Current labels use CAUTION, WARNING and DANGER to inform the user. In the experiment, the researchers used two other symbol systems: circles in traffic light colors and skull intensity symbols. Participants’ understanding of the pesticides’ toxicity improved from 54 percent to 95 percent using the traffic light colors and rose to 83 percent using the skull symbols. This improved understanding led to participants choosing the less toxic pesticides.

The current study’s meta-analysis included 49 primary studies published between 1990 and 2023. The participants’ attitudes toward risks were divided between human health and ecological health. For human health, the meta-analysis subdivided the pooled responses into farmers and consumers. There was great variation in the categories and definitions used in the subject studies, so the researchers divided the effects into bins: cancer, acute and chronic effects and unspecified effects. Of the 107 studies involving consumers, 58 did not specify particular effects and 42 included cancer. The 52 farmer studies were more evenly distributed across the bins, but with only four studies including cancer. For ecological concerns, participants were asked to value risks to terrestrial and aquatic organisms, surface and groundwater, and biodiversity.

Another concept involved in the assessment of WTP is baseline risk. In medicine, baseline risk is the chance that a person will contract cancer, for example, without the exposure of interest, such as a pesticide. People will use their general impression of baseline risk to decide how much they are willing to pay to prevent or lower the risk. In the meta-analytic study, the researchers found that “individuals are willing to pay higher values to reduce medium and high risk levels compared to low baseline risks.” Further, in studies that failed to define “the specific baseline pesticide risks,” respondents gave “significantly lower WTP estimates for pesticide risk reductions or elimination of these risks. Thus, the absence of information about baseline risks in…surveys makes respondents undervalue pesticide-related risks. Similarly, not specifying the public health implications of pesticide use significantly lowers mean WTP.”

Here again, there is manipulation of the consumer or farmers’ ignorance as to the real risks of pesticides. One simple and obvious correction would be for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to meaningfully reform pesticide labeling to convey those risks more accurately. As was noted in our August Daily News, terms currently required on pesticide labels are ineffective. Further, EPA allows one participant in the economic transaction, the pesticide manufacturer, to withhold enormous amounts of relevant information from the other participant, the farmer or consumer. For example, EPA relies on toxicity testing performed by or on behalf of the manufacturer which is not available to the public before the product is registered, and EPA does not require pesticide manufacturers to disclose toxicity data of so-called inert ingredients.

The meta-analysis’s framework for assessing people’s concerns with pesticides and their desired solutions reflects even deeper assumptions in economics that any consequences to society can be assigned monetary values, and that the measure of a society’s value of some activity or substance is how much people are willing to pay for it or to avoid it. These assumptions have permeated environmentalism in the form of “ecosystems services” in the hope that this will preserve ecosystems. But ecosystems are literally priceless, because people cannot exist without them, and people want to preserve them for more than economic reasons.

This kind of monetization skews public discourse because it reduces all human values to those operating in financial transactions. Yet there is growing interest in a “well-being economy,” one that incorporates numerous values not directly connected to standard economic measures such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Defined as the “total market value of the goods and services produced by a country’s economy during a specified period of time,” the GDP is treated as a proxy for the health of a country. In a white paper on the well-being economy, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) admits that “taking GDP as a single compass does not provide policy-makers with a sufficiently rich and accurate picture of the way in which the economy performs for citizens or of the long-term impacts of growth on sustainability.”

Clearly the asymmetrical information system between people exposed to pesticides and pesticide manufacturers undermines both human and ecological health. The meta-analysis authors note that even recent economic valuation research on pesticide reduction preferences “continues to lack critical information on the risk characteristics of the specific chemical substances involved. Such reporting would be consistent with current chemical regulations, such as the European Union’s registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemicals in its 2007 REACH legislation, which [is] based on the specific risk profiles of individual and compound substances and their associated toxicity.”

If economic approaches to protecting the health of humans and the environment are to be useful, this information asymmetry is one of the first things that must be corrected. Beyond Pesticides offers a rich archive of both detailed information about hundreds of pesticides’ human and ecosystem health effects and ways to push for rational policy reform reflecting the evidence of harm. See our Pesticide Illness and Disease Database (PIDD). For consumer resources on safer management of pests, including weeds and insects, see the Safer Choice page. See Tools for Change for a range of strategies, resources, and tips to initiate grassroots advocacy in your community, town, city, or state against pesticide use on lawns, public land, and agricultural lands.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Sources:

The social costs of pesticides: a meta-analysis of the experimental and stated preference literature
Nature Scientific Reports
Rufo et al.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-83298-3#Abs1

Study Finds Pesticide Product Labels Fail to Convey Toxic Effects to Consumers
Beyond Pesticides, August 28, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/08/study-finds-pesticide-product-labels-fail-to-convey-toxic-effects-to-consumers/

The economy of well-being: Creating opportunities for people’s well-being and economic growth
Llena-Nozal et al.
OECD 2019
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-economy-of-well-being_498e9bc7-en.html

Study Captures Agronomists’ Advice to Farmers and Continued Reliance on Toxic Pesticides
Beyond Pesticides, July 12, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/07/study-captures-agronomists-advice-to-farmers-and-continued-reliance-on-toxic-pesticides/

A Meta-Analysis of the Willingness to Pay for Reductions in Pesticide Risk Exposure
Travisi, Chiara et al
EconStor 2004
https://hdl.handle.net/10419/117978

Improving consumer understanding of pesticide toxicity labels: experimental evidence
Hosni et al.
Nature Scientific Reports 2024
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-68288-9

(Beyond Pesticides, January 21, 2025) When the American Cancer Society (ACS) published its annual report last week, it pointed to a rising incidence of cancer in younger women and highlighted disparities by race and ethnicity that are especially timely with the commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In its report, “Cancer Mortality Continues to Drop Despite Rising Incidence in Women; Rates of New Diagnoses Under 65 Higher in Women Than Men,” ACS writes:

“Disparities in cancer occurrence and outcomes are often the result of socioeconomic deprivation as a consequence of structural racism, which limits opportunities for education and other mechanisms of upward mobility. For example, the historical practice of mortgage lending discrimination known as redlining is associated with later stage cancer diagnosis, lower likelihood of receiving recommended treatment, and higher cancer mortality. Inequalities in wealth lead to differences in the prevalence of risk factor exposures as well as access to high-quality cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment. Even beyond higher prevalence of common risk factors like smoking and obesity, exposure to carcinogenic air emissions is up to 50% higher among people experiencing poverty, regardless of race or ethnicity. In 2022, 25% of AIAN [American Indian and Alaska Native] people lived below the federal poverty level ($27,750 for a family of four), as well as 17% of Black and Hispanic people, compared with 9% of White and Asian people. Persistent poverty ranks among the leading causes of death alongside smoking and is consistently associated with higher cancer incidence, later stage diagnosis, and worse outcomes. The effects of poverty are both compounded by and independent of racial status. A recent study found that living in a disadvantaged neighborhood increased the likelihood of aggressive prostate cancer by 30% among Black men but had no impact on risk in White men, suggesting the contribution of race-specific factors, such as minority stress.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us that even the wealthiest of us are dependent on those less fortunate, whose work is not adequately rewarded in our capitalist economy—farmworkers, landscapers, workers in meat-packing and food processing plants, factory workers, hospital workers, sanitation workers—and those workers are disproportionately people of color. Beyond Pesticides is urging the public to remind our legislators of “their duty to protect the most exposed and most vulnerable members of society from the impacts of an economy unnecessarily dependent on toxic chemicals.”

>> This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, tell Congress to protect our farmworkers and those at disproportionate risk from toxic chemicals.  

Justice for all people converges with the protection of biodiversity, health, and climate. As Dr. King said in his 1967 Christmas sermon, “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”

If we are not protecting the most vulnerable in society, we ultimately adversely affect the entire society because we are intricately linked in the web of life. This is a day to recognize the importance and value of those who are disproportionately affected by toxic chemical production, transportation, use, and disposal (including those who live in fenceline communities near chemical plants or agricultural fields) redouble our focus on their protection, and adopt practices and policies that no longer support environmental racism. On this day, we recognize that we can all individually shift our personal and community practices to organic management and products, and, in so doing, eliminate the cradle-to-grave exposures that disproportionately affect people of color.

Dr. King’s words in his 1967 sermon clearly focus on addressing injustices for disenfranchised people. Similarly, with biodiversity collapse looming, it has become exceedingly clear that the protection of ecosystems requires support for those organisms most vulnerable but essential to all life. And just as we need to recognize our dependence on vulnerable humans and protect them, we must similarly recognize and protect vulnerable members of all species integral to the web of life.

Environmental injustice looms large on the horizon. Workers integral to meeting societal needs—especially in agriculture and landscaping—face the threat of deportation. Pesticide regulation, which has failed even under friendly administrations to protect human health, enhance biodiversity, and prevent climate disasters—is in need of reform in order to protect those at greatest risk, and in doing so, protect us all.

Beyond Pesticides states, “We recognize the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a new administration takes office. We need to ask all leaders to follow Dr. King’s leadership in recognizing the need to protect the most vulnerable among us.” 

Here are some actions Congress can take:

Ensure protection for farmworkers. 

• Farmworkers need more protections, not industry-friendly compromises when alternatives are available. Currently, the average life expectancy for a farmworker is 49 years, compared to 78 for the general population. A recent report, Exposed and At Risk: Opportunities to Strengthen Enforcement of Pesticide Regulations for Farmworker Safety, by the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School, in partnership with the nonprofit advocacy group, Farmworker Justice, again highlights the systemic racism of our country’s pesticide policies. Our nation depends on farmworkers, declared “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic, to ensure sustenance for the nation and world. Yet, the occupational exposure to toxic pesticides by farmworkers is discounted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while study after study documents the disproportionate level of illness among farmworkers.
• Many farmworkers are migrant workers, and are subject to conditions that would not be permitted for U.S. citizens. The U.S. must sign the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which would set a moral standard to treat migrant workers like workers who are citizens.
• Prohibit the use of toxic fumigants that endanger farmworkers and their communities.  

Protect all who are at disproportionate risk.

• Require EPA to begin meaningful dialogue with Native American tribes to learn how pesticide use can be avoided by adopting indigenous practices. When needs can be met without using pesticides, such use causes “unreasonable adverse effects on the environment.”
• Require that registration decisions take into account cradle-to-grave exposures. Harm done in the manufacture, transportation, and disposal—in addition to use—of pesticides must count as “unreasonable adverse effects.”  
• Prohibit the registration of pesticides that threaten children, biodiversity, or the climate.
• Phase out toxic petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers by 2032. 

>> This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, tell Congress to protect our farmworkers and those at disproportionate risk from toxic chemicals.   

Members of Congress
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us that even the wealthiest of us are dependent on those less fortunate, whose work is not rewarded in our economic system—farmworkers, landscapers, workers in meat-packing and food processing plants, factory workers, hospital workers, sanitation workers —who are predominately people of color. So, on Martin Luther King Day, as we commemorate Dr. King, it is fitting to seek better protections for the most exposed and most vulnerable members of society from the impacts of our economy, which is unnecessarily dependent on toxic chemicals

Justice for all people converges with the protection of biodiversity, health, and climate. As Dr. King said in his 1967 Christmas sermon, “[A]ll life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.” 

Dr. King’s words in his 1967 sermon clearly focus on addressing injustices for disenfranchised people. Similarly, with biodiversity collapse looming, it has become exceedingly clear that the protection of ecosystems requires support for those organisms most vulnerable but essential to all life. And just as we need to recognize our dependence on vulnerable humans and protect them, we must similarly recognize and protect vulnerable members of all species integral to the web of life.

Environmental injustice looms large on the horizon. Workers integral to meeting societal needs—especially in agriculture and landscaping—face the threat of deportation. Pesticide regulation, which has failed even under friendly administrations to protect human health, enhance biodiversity, and prevent climate disasters, is in need of reform in order to protect those at greatest risk—and in doing so, protect us all.

As a new administration takes office, we need to ask all leaders to follow Dr. King’s leadership in recognizing the need to protect the most vulnerable among us. 

Here are some actions I would like to see Congress take:

(1) Ensure protection for farmworkers
Farmworkers need more protections, not industry-friendly compromises when alternatives are available. Currently, the average life expectancy for a farmworker is 49 years, compared to 78 for the general population. Our nation depends on farmworkers, declared “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic, to ensure sustenance for the nation and world. Yet, the occupational exposure to toxic pesticides by farmworkers is discounted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while study after study documents the disproportionate level of illness among farmworkers. 

The U.S. must sign the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which would set a moral standard to treat migrant workers like workers who are citizens.

Prohibit the use of toxic fumigants that endanger farmworkers and their communities. 

(2) Protect all who are at disproportionate risk. 
Require EPA to begin meaningful dialogue with Native American tribes to learn how pesticide use can be avoided by adopting indigenous practices. When needs can be met without using pesticides, such use causes “unreasonable adverse effects on the environment.”

Require that registration decisions take into account cradle-to-grave exposures. Harm done in the manufacture, transportation, and disposal—in addition to use—of pesticides must count as “unreasonable adverse effects.” 

Prohibit the registration of pesticides that threaten children, biodiversity, or the climate.

Please join me in seeking to phase out toxic petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers by 2032 and replace them with organic management practices that are both effective and cost-competitive.

Thank you.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

 Sources: Cancer statistics, 2025

(Beyond Pesticides, January 17-20, 2025) Martin Luther King Day recognizes the achievements of a remarkable civil rights leader while asking the nation to assess what more the country must do to ensure equality and environmental justice, as well as protection for those who suffer disproportionately from toxic chemical exposure. Advocates and disproportionately affected communities acknowledge the historic nature of the Biden Administration’s commitment to elevating environmental justice in the decision-making of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

However, according to Willy Blackmore, writer for Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder (“the oldest Black-owned newspaper in the state of Minnesota and one of the longest-standing, family-owned newspapers in the country”), “[T]he more systemic change that [Administrator] Regan’s EPA tried to bring about was stonewalled by legal challenges that threatened to undermine the agency’s strongest tool for righting environmental injustices.”

Black communities across the nation face disproportionate impacts to petrochemical infrastructure and toxic chemicals, including pesticides and fertilizers. A 2021 study published in BMC Public Health found that biomarkers for 12 dangerous pesticides tracked over the past 20 years were found in the blood and urine of Black participants at average levels up to five times those in White participants. A University of Michigan study found that African American women are 40 percent more likely to die from breast cancer than women of any race. This same study found that triple-negative cancer (basal-liked breast cancer) is approximately three-fold higher in non-Hispanic Black women compared to non-Hispanic White women.

In the context of disproportionate harms and imagining a world free of toxic petrochemical pesticides, Dr. Martin Luther King’s Christmas Eve Sermon of 1967 at his home church of Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia demonstrates his perspective on adopting a holistic approach to solving seemingly insurmountable challenges of our time.

Dr. King said, “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

As the nation faces the dual occasions of inaugurating a U.S. president known for stoking division while simultaneously celebrating the legacy of a life-long organizer and titan of environmental, economic, and racial justice, Beyond Pesticides looks to reflect on the track record of the Biden Administration to apply these lessons to renewed public interest in transformative change in our communities with organic as an environmental justice solution.

Environmental Justice (EJ) under the Biden Administration

Throughout the Biden Administration, Beyond Pesticides, through the Daily News and Action of the Week, called on the Administration to implement its groundbreaking environmental justice commitments as outlined in various Executive Orders, legislative actions, and executive agency actions to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

See Daily News here from February 5, 2021, analyzing the initial rollout of Executive Orders that intertwined environmental and racial justice by aiming to comprehensively reform the Office of Management and Budget operations, restore scientific integrity, and develop a “whole of government” approach to addressing the climate crisis and disproportionate impacts on frontline and disadvantaged communities.

Office of Budget and Management: Politics of Pricing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

There is a long history of incorporating the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe) into budgetary analysis, regulatory actions, and federally-funded projects. See here for a regulatory tracker developed by Harvard Law School Environmental & Energy Law Program for a longer history of the Biden Administration’s track record through 2023, as well as the history of GHG pricing beginning in the Obama Administration.

In January 2024, World Resources Institute conducted a climate action progress tracker, finding the Biden Administration to have made several pivotal achievements, including:

• “Set target to cut emissions by at least 50% by 2030;
• Pass a major climate-smart stimulus package [Inflation Reduction Act] after Covid-19; [and]
• Tackle super pollutants.”

Meanwhile, the same analysis found that the Administration was off track for taxing pollution. Beyond Pesticides raised concerns throughout the Biden Administration about the co-option of climate-smart funding and programs by pesticide industry actors to incorporate pesticide products as a necessary component of holistic climate solutions. (See Daily News here and here for examples to debunk these myths.)

On the subject of scientific integrity, advocates see that little has changed in ensuring sound science in EPA decision-making on pesticide and chemical regulations. There was a public comment period that closed earlier this year (see the Action of the Week here) in response to the Presidential Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking.

As of today’s publication, EPA has not published a final draft of the updated Scientific Integrity Policy. According to its website, “The updated Scientific Integrity Policy is expected to be released this year [2024] and will be posted on the Scientific Integrity Website with corresponding outreach and training materials.” Given the direction of the incoming administration, the future of resolving scientific integrity appears to be stalled indefinitely.

Whole-of-Government Approach : Justice40 in Context

Another Executive Order signed on January 27, 2021, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” put into place commitments to put teeth into these EOs, leading to the creation of the Justice40 Initiative. The goal of Justice40 was transformational in that it aimed to dedicate “40 percent of the overall benefits of certain Federal climate, clean energy, affordable and sustainable housing, and other investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.”

An independent analysis by Resources for the Future, “an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, D.C,” of 445 Justice40 covered programs released by the White House in April 2023 finds a mixed bag for implementation of EJ commitments in a programmatic sense.

For example, 30 percent of the programs (133 programs) reviewed are “not making information about their activities available to the public.” However, 98 of the programs are considered to fall under the category of “full implementation and achievement of the 40 percent goal,” representing the second highest category. It remains to be seen what the full impact of Justice40 has been moving forward.

An additional action the Biden Administration took through this EO was the establishment of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC) with the goal of “bring[ing] greater visibility to EJ issues across the federal government but will provide EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) with an excellent partner for providing horizon-expanding EJ advice and recommendations to our government’s leadership.” While it remains unclear the full extent to which WHEJAC pushed the needle on environmental justice under the Biden Administration, advocates believe the creation of this Council is critical in mounting pressure within and across executive actions. (See here for the full list of WHEJAC recommendations.)

EJ Moving Forward

Principles of environmental justice, including diversity, equity, and inclusion, will be on the chopping block in the second Trump administration, given the track record of the first administration and rhetoric among key Trump advisors.

The Trump-affiliated Project 2025 represents significant risks of exacerbating continuing disproportionate harms to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities across various federal agencies.

For example, there is a proposal to “[s]hift responsibility for evaluating misconduct away from its Office of Scientific Integrity, which has been overseen by environmental activists, and toward an independent body.” It says EPA’s “scientific enterprise, including the ORD [Office of Research and Development], has rightly been criticized for decades as precautionary, bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals.” Environmental and public health advocates view the irony of Project 2025 given that it recommends placing political appointees across EPA and other federal agencies. See Daily News here for extensive commentary on Project 2025 implications for environmental law moving forward.

Advocates are not surprised by Project 2025 given what they view as the lackluster track record of the previous Trump Administration on regulatory and scientific integrity. For example, the EPA under Trump 1.0 announced in an eleventh-hour move the finalization of what advocates dubbed the “Secret Science” rule, which would have significantly restricted the scientific research EPA uses in developing regulations to amplify public health, biodiversity regeneration, and climate action.

Additionally, EPA under the first Trump Administration established the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, a precursor to the eventual SCOTUS decision in Sackett v. EPA (2023) in which Clean Water Act protections are only applied to contiguous “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS), excluding groundwater, ephemeral streams, and critical wetland ecosystems that do not connect directly to waterbodies that are not clearly defined under the WOTUS definition. Recent research conducted by Yale University and the University of Massachusetts determined that the Sackett decision “endangered the drinking water sources of at least 117 million Americans by stripping protections from over half of the nation’s wetlands, as well as up to nearly 5 million miles of rain-dependent and seasonal streams that feed into rivers, lakes, and estuaries.” [See Daily News here for an analysis and the initial reactions to the Sackett ruling from environmental and public health advocates in 2023.]

There were various other actions that raised concerns, including the eleventh-hour approval of various toxic pesticides. There was the reapproval of the previously canceled insecticide aldicarb (see Daily News here), the reregistration of bee-toxic flonicamid, and the disinfectant ethylene oxide (see Daily News here), as well as continuing the registration of chlorpyrifos (see Daily News here). According to an analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity, at least 100 new pesticide products were approved in the first administration that were either banned in other countries or were in the process of a phaseout. The Trump-led EPA also promulgated a rule that would have weakened pesticide buffer zones, having direct implications for farmworkers and frontline communities living in agricultural areas (see Daily News here). Ultimately, a federal court blocked this rule from moving forward (see Daily News here).

The legacy of environmental justice falls on the shoulders of, among other members of Congress, the ranking members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate Agriculture Committees, Representative Angie Craig (D-MN) and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), respectively. In the upcoming Farm Bill negotiations, their plate will include funding the twenty “orphan” Farm Bill programs without guaranteed funding, including three organic programs: Organic Cost Share, Organic Data Initiative, and Organic Certification Trade and Tracking program. (See here for the National Organic Coalition’s press release.)

Given President-elect Trump’s pledge in a C-Span interview in late 2024 to “… eliminat[e] 10 old regulations for every new one,” there is a renewed commitment to invest in local actions and push local elected officials to protect public health, biodiversity, and climate resilience. See Daily News here for reflections on the importance of protecting democracy and the ability of communities to protect themselves from cascading crises.

In the face of deregulatory actions likely to exacerbate disproportionate risks and impacts of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, as well as industrial chemicals, on communities of color across the nation, there are Black-led organizations that are advancing the mission of eliminating petrochemical dependence by advancing food and land management systems that move toward organic principles and practices.

Consider supporting SAAFON (Southeastern African American Farmers Organic Network). SAAFON was founded in 2006 to partner with Black farmers in the Southeast to attain USDA organic certification, while advocating for their needs in the broader sustainable agriculture movement. Also consider supporting Black Farmers Index, which offers a directory of Black-owned and operated farms around the country, including certified organic farmers and resources for farmers interested in going through the organic certification process.

Join Beyond Pesticides in taking action through the holiday weekend! >> This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, tell Congress to protect our farmworkers and those at disproportionate risk from toxic chemicals.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Sources: Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, World Resources Institute, Resources for the Future

(Beyond Pesticides, January 16, 2025) In Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, researchers highlight a multitude of studies on endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and endocrine disrupting pesticides (EDPs) showing epigenetic effects from exposure. These EDCs imitate the action of endocrine hormones and lead to gene damage and multigenerational adverse effects to health.

“These chemicals can interfere with the normal functioning of target tissues by altering their response to hormonal signals, thereby affecting various physiological processes including reproduction, development, the nervous system, the immune system, and even the process of carcinogenesis [causing cancer],” according to the authors from Hebei Agricultural University and Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.  

In causing epigenetic modifications, the authors describe that EDCs can create changes “at the nuclear and mitochondrial DNA (nDNA and mtDNA) or RNA levels, without changing the underlying DNA sequence. These alterations modify the structure or conformation of DNA, influencing gene expression and, consequently, cellular function.” They continue, “The mechanisms of epigenetics include changes in DNA methylation, chromatin modifications and the involvement of certain noncoding RNAs.”

In reviewing over 80 studies on EDCs, predominantly fluorinated compounds such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the researchers provide a summary of linkages between pesticide exposure and the threats to health on a cellular level. The studies on EDCs “include typical pesticides such as organophosphorus, organochlorine, pyrethroid, carbamate, and triazole pesticides, which can induce estrogenic, androgenic, and thyroid hormone effects in the body,” the authors note.

They continue: “Their actions hinge on intricate hormone signaling pathways, which have the potential to disrupt various aspects of the endocrine system in humans and other animals, leading to abnormal effects within the organism. It is widely recognized that the action of EDPs is related to their structural similarity to natural hormones, which endows EDPs with the ability to mimic endogenous hormones [those produced inside a cell] by binding to target hormone receptors.”

With the high sensitivity of organisms to epigenetic changes, exposure to EDPs at very low concentrations poses a threat. These chemicals are also prone to accumulating in human tissues and can lead to chronic impacts. (See more on body burden here.) The authors describe exposure methods and the resulting implications in saying: “EDPs enter organisms through various routes, including food ingestion, breathing, and skin contact. EDPs exert endocrine-disrupting effects with potentially wide-ranging effects on the reproductive system. They can impact the development and functionality of the gonads, resulting in imbalances in sex hormone levels that may cause reproductive issues, including infertility and gonadal tumors.”

There is a wide body of science showcasing the connection of pesticides to endocrine disruption. Numerous studies document exposure to EDPs, including PFAS, leading to dysfunction of the body’s endocrine system as well as additional health effects such as cancer, brain and nervous system disorders, immune system disorders, diabetes, learning/developmental impacts, and sexual and reproductive dysfunction.

Within the review, studies document:

• “[E]nvironmentally relevant concentrations of flutolanil [fungicide] resulted in a significant increase in the level of DNA methylation in the ovaries of zebrafish leading to an endocrine-disrupting response and detrimental effects on the development of their offspring.” Flutolanil also alters the expression of estrogen-responsive genes.
• Sulfoxaflor (insecticide) impacts bees by reducing survival and interfering with intestinal metabolites and steroid hormone biosynthesis.
• Epoxiconazole (fungicide) influences fetal and maternal steroid hormone levels, disrupts critical enzymes related to steroid hormone synthesis, and affects fetal development and endocrinological processes.
• Fipronil (insecticide) exhibits toxicities in both animals and humans including neurotoxicity, hepatotoxicity, nephrotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, and endocrine disruption.
• Trifluralin (herbicide) reduces fertilization in zebrafish with “sex-specific reproductive toxicity and endocrine-disrupting effects in these fish.”
• Lambda-cyhalothrin (insecticide) reduces spermatozoa, leads to reproductive disorders in male mice, and “exhibits neurotoxic properties, disrupting the hippocampal neurodevelopment in mice via the estrogen membrane receptor signaling pathway.”
• “[L]ow concentrations of endosulfan [insecticide] caused an estrogen-disrupting effect on MCF-7 [a human breast cancer cell line], and endosulfan significantly increased the expression of histone deacetylase (HDAC) and DNA methyltransferase (DNMT) in MCF-7, suggesting that endosulfan has a modulating effect on cellular epigenetic regulators.”
• Embryonic stem cells from mice exposed to imidacloprid (insecticide), metolachlor (herbicide), and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) (insecticide) experience induced cellular DNA methylation.
• Cyfluthrin (insecticide) impacts estrogen-responsive genes and progesterone receptor genes that lead to estrogen disrupting effects.
• Hexachlorobenzene (fungicide), methoxychlor (insecticide), and glyphosate (herbicide) are linked to molecular mechanisms that promote breast and ovarian cancer.
• EDPs are linked to disruptions in “various pathways involved in thyroid hormone biosynthesis, metabolism, receptor activation, and function” and lead to thyroid disorders.

In summarizing these results, the researchers state, “As a class of particularly representative endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the accumulation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances potentially leads to adverse health effects, including hormonal disruptions, developmental issues, and cancer.” These effects are as a result of complex mechanisms that are not yet fully understood or assessed in pesticide registration processes through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The researchers further explain: “Due to the distinct structural features of EDPs, the mode of their toxic action varies with different dosages, influencing the molecular mechanisms of hormone secretion, targets, and even the toxic pathways that affect various hormones in various ways indeed at extremely low concentrations. Nonetheless, the biological mechanisms underlying their effects remain incompletely understood. Consequently, the complexity of cell models is essential for summarizing and investigating the mechanisms of action of these EDPs.”

Without fully understanding these mechanisms, advocates say, as previously reported by Beyond Pesticides, that EPA falls far short in addressing the full range of endocrine disrupting effects of all pesticide ingredients, as is required to protect human health and the environment. EPA should not approve or reregister pesticides until the full scope of the potential harm from chemicals can be addressed. (See additional Daily News coverage here and here.)

The authors reinforce this in saying: “A comprehensive evaluation of the toxicity of pesticides and their metabolites is necessary to understand their potential risks and take appropriate measures… Combined exposure to multiple EDPs has been indicated to have a synergistic effect, i.e., the effects generated by interactions of the EDPs are higher than the comprehensive effect caused by the individuals. It makes assessing and predicting the risk of EDPs more complex and critical.”

To mitigate the endocrine disrupting effects of these pesticides that display detrimental long-term health effects, even at low doses, and threaten the health of humans and wildlife, the holistic solution of organic land management is available. In eliminating the use of petrochemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, organic methods safeguard public health and biodiversity.

To learn more about the benefits of organic land management, see here and here. Take action by helping to transition your community to organic through the Parks for a Sustainable Future program as a Parks Advocate. Become a member of Beyond Pesticides to add your voice to the organic solution and stay informed by signing up for our Action of the Week and Weekly News Updates.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Source:

Liu, Y. et al. (2025) The potential endocrine-disrupting of fluorinated pesticides and molecular mechanism of EDPs in cell models, Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147651324016919.

(Beyond Pesticides, January 15, 2025) There is robust scientific literature that unpacks the adverse human health effects of pesticide exposure, however immunological impacts do not receive adequate attention in regulatory review processes, according to an in-depth literature review. In a piece published in Frontiers in Immunology (2024) critiquing recent peer-reviewed scientific studies, as well as unpublished research produced by the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine in partnership with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina, researchers assess immune system effects of pesticide exposure, which creates the conditions for deadly health conditions including various forms of cancer.

The focus of this study, according to the authors, is “to critically review fundamental aspects of toxicological studies conducted on PPPs [Plant Protection Products] to provide a clearer understanding of the risks associated with exposure to these compounds on human health.” PPPs are pesticide products that contain more than one active ingredient, and can include synergistic ingredients that supercharge them alongside inert ingredients that pesticide companies are not legally required to disclose under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), but are often manipulated biologically and chemically active.

Most studies analyze the toxicological impacts of active ingredients in isolation rather than testing the entire product, including glyphosate-based herbicides. Additionally, authors identify an insufficient body of research measuring cancer biomarkers connected to specific pesticides, even though they “are essential to precisely and timely understand the extent and depth of the problem.” The researchers acknowledge that while more research is also necessary to better understand the impacts of chemical mixtures on agricultural communities and the broader public, further investigations into mechanisms of toxicity for individual pesticides are integral to public health and awareness in regulatory decision-making.

Immune Response and Pesticides

The literature review finds that more studies are needed to determine immunotoxic impacts of pesticides in human subjects, with the researchers pointing to three relevant peer-reviewed studies. These studies are similar in that they assess cytokine levels among farmworker and farmer populations to determine relationships between pesticide exposure and deadly diseases, specifically cancer. The National Cancer Institute defines cytokines as “a type of protein that is made by certain immune and non-immune cells and has an effect on the immune system.” Simply put, cytokines act as signals to the immune system. There is evidence of pro-inflammatory cytokines, including but not limited to Th-2 cytokines, that can create the conditions for various types of cancers, infections, and other severe diseases.

The first study (published in Science of the Total Environment in 2024) assesses pesticide exposure among 280 individuals in southeastern Spain. 189 of the participants made up the exposed group working in an indoor setting (horticultural greenhouse). The control group consisted of nonagricultural workers living near the greenhouses. The majority of participants from both subgroups were tested for 27 immunoregulatory proteins during high and low pesticide exposure periods. Ultimately, the researchers determined asthmatic conditions can be attributed to increased inflammatory cytokine levels among greenhouse workers in this study, among other health issues.

The second study (published in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety in 2020) assesses the immune response impacts of multiple pesticide exposure among Brazilian farmers and rural communities near the city of Santo Amaro da Imperatriz. The experimental group consisted of 43 farmers exposed to various pesticide exposures through their work over the course of at least fifteen years. The control group included 30 individuals in the region that did not have occupational exposure to pesticides. “The results of this study show that pro-inflammatory IL-6 [ILs are interleukins, a class of glycoproteins, or cytokine] was significantly elevated in the plasma of farmers compared to that of controls,” say the researchers in this study.

The third study (published in Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology in 2024) assesses association between organophosphate pesticide exposure and cytokine levels among flower workers in two different Mexican states. There are 143 flower workers who participated in this study. The authors in this study determine that organophosphate exposure decreased pro-inflammatory cytokines and increased one anti-inflammatory cytokines, “suggesting an imbalance of the immune response.” Cytokine imbalance can lead to increased risk of infectious diseases and cancer.

The authors who reviewed these studies also engaged in original research on the impact of chemical mixtures, building on previously published ecotoxicological research. “Unpublished data from our lab indicate that Roundup® (Bayer), a worldwide-used [glyphosate-based herbicide], when combined with Clorpi48 (Huagro) a chlorpyrifos-based insecticide (CbI), adversely impact on human NK [natural killer] cells from healthy donors,” says authors Norberto Walter Zwirner, PhD and Adrián David Friedrich, PhD. “Environmentally relevant exposure doses of these pesticides resulted in a reduced capacity of cytokine-stimulated NK cells [NK cells are a form of lymphocytes that can act as immune system defenders against the spread of microbial infections] to secrete interferon-gamma (IFN-γ). Furthermore, the combination of GbH and CbI impaired the cytotoxic capacity of NK cells against the tumor cell line K562. Regarding the adaptive immune response, our results indicate that the combination of GbH [glyphosate-based herbicides] and CbI [chlorpyrifos-based insecticides] negatively affected T cell proliferation and differentiation in vitro to Th1 cells.”

The authors conclude, “Altogether, data about the detrimental effects of pesticide mixtures on immune cell functions critical for immunosurveillance are growing and may help explain the increased cancer incidence observed in populations residing in areas exposed to pesticide fumigation.” See yesterday’s Daily News, Pesticides Harming Immune Cell Function Linked to Elevated Breast Cancer Rate in Young Women, for analysis linking immunotoxic impacts of pesticides and heightened risk of breast cancer.

Take Action

For decades, advocates have warned policymakers about the erosion of public trust borne from an inadequate regulatory and sometimes corrupt review process for pesticide products. Look no further than a 2020 press release from CropLife America, the lead U.S. lobbying group representing pesticide manufacturers, in discussing EPA’s “rigorous pesticide Registration Review process” for its proposed interim decision on neonicotinoid insecticides. (See here for public comments by Beyond Pesticides, in collaboration with a coalition of environmental, farmworker, public health, and community groups, on this decision.)

In numerous editions of Pesticides and You—the journal produced by Beyond Pesticides, which provides analyses of breaking public policies, science, and actions relating to pesticide, public health, climate, and biodiversity—there is a clear pattern of failure of federal regulators that permits the poisoning of people, wildlife, and ecosystems.

For easy access to the latest scientific literature dissecting the links between immune system disorders and pesticides, see the Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database.

As the Biden Administration winds to a close, advocates continue to emphasize the importance of local decision making and action in the service of public health, biodiversity, and climate resilience. See the first Action of the Week for 2025 to contact mayors and local elected officials to urge action in transitioning away from toxic petrochemical-based pesticides on public grounds.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Sources: Frontiers in Immunology

(Beyond Pesticides, January 14, 2025) Women with occupational pesticide exposure have elevated rates of breast cancer, according to a study in Immunopharmacology and Immunotoxicology. Based on an analysis of clinicopathological data from 188 affected women, the study authors demonstrate “that occupational exposure to pesticides modifies the clinical presentation of disease in breast cancer patients, depending on their age at disease onset, affecting cytokine production, especially in those exhibiting early age at diagnosis.”  

“Breast cancer (BC) is the most common malignant neoplasm affecting women worldwide and the second leading cause of cancer-related death in this population,” the researchers report. They continue: “Aging is the primary risk factor associated with breast cancer development and mortality, resulting in a cumulative lifetime risk of 1 in 8 women developing the disease. Disease onset significantly impacts patient prognosis. While most cases are of late onset and occur in women over 50 years of age, early-onset BC is prevalent in certain populations and is associated with a poor prognosis and aggressive tumor behavior.” 

Data was collected and analyzed from May 2015 to December 2022, with the study population in Brazil spanning “27 municipalities in the southwest of Paraná, a region characterized by extensive pesticide use, predominantly rural work, and family farming, with significant participation from women,” the authors state. All patients included in the study underwent screening for familial cancer and genetic testing for BRCA 1 and 2 mutations.  

Based on age and pesticide exposure, the women were organized into four groups: pesticide-unexposed women with early disease onset (48 women), pesticide-unexposed women with late disease onset (45 women), pesticide-exposed women with early disease onset (50 women), and pesticide-exposed women with late disease onset (45 women). 

A variety of additional clinicopathological variables were considered, including menopausal status at diagnosis, body mass index, hormonal receptor status (estrogen and progesterone, positive or negative), human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) overexpression, Ki67 proliferation index, histological grade, breast cancer molecular subtype, tumor size, presence of distant metastasis, lymph node metastasis, risk stratification for recurrence and death, chemoresistance, and death occurrence. Analyses were also performed to assess the relationship between cytokine levels, pesticide exposure, and disease onset age. 

As a result, the researchers find that:  

• the late-onset group shows a greater frequency of low-grade tumors in exposed patients compared to the unexposed group.   

• a higher frequency of high-risk stratification for recurrence and death is seen in early-onset patients when comparing exposed and unexposed groups. 

• patients in the late-onset group show a higher frequency of triple-negative tumors than unexposed women. 

• IL-12 levels are significantly lower in exposed patients in the early-onset group compared to unexposed patients in the same group.  

• early-onset patients show positive correlation between cytokine levels and pesticide exposure while late-onset patients show negative correlations. 

This study reveals “distinct cytokine profiles correlated with pesticide exposure depending on the age of disease onset. In early-onset patients, pesticide exposure positively correlated with IL-1ß, IL-17A, and IL-4 [ILs are interleukins, a class of glycoproteins, or cytokines, produced by leukocytes, or white blood cells, for regulating immune responses], while in late-onset patients, pesticide exposure showed a negative correlation with IL-12, IL-4, and IL-17A,” the authors share. According to the authors: “These findings suggest that young women exposed to pesticides tend to develop decreased serum levels of IL-12. This feature is possibly associated with reduced type I immunity which is important for eliminating BC. Type I immunity promotes natural killer cell (NK) and CD8+ T-cell-mediated tumor cytotoxicity and toxic mediator release by phagocytes within the tumor microenvironment, leading to cancer cell death via multiple mechanisms.” 

In examining the cytokine levels within each patient, an association between early-onset exposed women and the development of high-risk tumors was determined. “These findings indicate that pesticide exposure induces an inflammaging-like state in young women, with increased levels of systemic IL-1 and reduced levels of IL-12 contributing to the increased risk of severe disease in these individuals,” the researchers conclude. 

Environmental exposure to pesticides affects the homeostasis of mammary epithelial cells and can result in cancer development. Pesticide exposure triggers inflammatory responses, which leads to the release of toxic mediators like reactive oxygen species (ROS). “These processes are linked to precarcinogenic events, which may result in cumulative mutations over time and genomic instability,” the authors say. They continue, “Environmental factors, particularly those encountered throughout life, can play a key role in influencing the natural history of mammary gland tumorigenesis and BC progression. Occupational pesticide exposure is a significant environmental risk factor for BC.”  

With greater female participation in rural labor comes an increase in women’s health risks with direct exposure to pesticides that significantly impacts mammary tissues and creates a pro-inflammatory environment. This is characterized by antioxidant depletion, elevated levels of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNFα), and increased activity of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARγ)—all contributing to cancer progression.  

Many pesticides have been detected in women’s mammary gland tissues and breast milk. (See additional studies here and here.) The researchers postulate, “Approximately 35 pesticides with carcinogenic potential have been identified as contributors to tumors or other adverse effects on the mammary glands, indicating that exposure to these substances directly affects breast cells. Studies in animal models demonstrate that exposure to certain pesticides is linked to significant genetic damage, such as DNA breaks and aneuploidy—critical alterations that can lead to the development of breast cancer.” 

Scientific literature finds that pesticide exposure disrupts cellular homeostasis, causes cellular injury, and can lead to cell death. Exposure can also initiate the development of diseases by compromising immunosurveillance, particularly against tumors. (See studies here, here, and here.) The heightened risks for cancer development are associated with the cumulative genotoxic effects, chromosomal damage, and inflammation that occurs after pesticide exposure. These effects lead to genomic instability and immune alterations that have “significant implications for carcinogenesis and tumor progression,” the authors report. 

Long-term oxidative stress is linked to many chronic diseases, including cancer, and there is a wide body of science showing many pesticides causing oxidative stress. (See here, here, and here.) Previous studies also link atrazine to breast cancer, as this pesticide can suppress systemic and local tumor immune functions that promote tumor development. Low concentrations of glyphosate, even with acute exposure, increase ROS levels, induce hypoxia, and disrupt the DNA repair response in human triple-negative BC cells. See more examples of studies on pesticides causing cancer here, here, here, here, here, and here. 

As an alternative to chemicals that cause cancer, endocrine disruption, and a myriad of other health effects, organic agriculture provides a holistic solution for food production. In managing all land with organic methods, the crises of public health, biodiversity, and climate change are mitigated and the environment, and all organisms it supports, are protected.  

Learn more about the health implications of pesticide exposure through the Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database, as well as the benefits of organic here and here. Stay up to date with the latest science and policy developments with the Daily News Blog and sign up to receive Action of the Week and Weekly News Updates straight to your inbox here.  

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.  

Source: 

Cardoso Maciel Costa Silva, R. et al. (2024) Occupational exposure to pesticides affects systemic cytokine profile and correlates with poor clinical prognosis in young women with breast cancer, Immunopharmacology and Immunotoxicology. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08923973.2024.2430665.  

(Beyond Pesticides, January 13, 2025) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is officially taking comments on whether to issue new restrictions on the herbicide atrazine’s use. Beyond Pesticides is telling the agency that it is time to recognize the biodiversity destruction that atrazine is causing and the viability of alternative organic management practices. The group has released an action and is asking the public to join this campaign to ban atrazine.

As a yardstick for what is possible under existing federal pesticide law (the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act), EPA on August 7, 2024 announced that it was taking emergency action to ban the weed killer Dacthal (or DCPA–dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate), leaving many people asking, “Why Dacthal and not other very hazardous pesticides?” The weed killer atrazine (in the triazine chemical family) poses similar elevated hazards to people and the environment, has proven to be impossible to contain, and has viable alternatives. Therefore, we need to challenge EPA to apply the same standard that removed Dacthal from the market to the long list of pesticides that are contributing to a health crisis, biodiversity collapse, and the climate emergency. 

In its current proposal, EPA is choosing to downplay atrazine’s risk to ecosystems, allow more contamination with the herbicide, and apply a wishy-washy, ineffective enforcement mechanism. In reevaluating the risk to aquatic systems, EPA has chosen to exclude four of the six experiments that it previously judged to show an effect on aquatic plant communities, which allowed it to increase the allowed concentration of atrazine in surface water from 3.4 ug/L to 9.7 ug/L. If atrazine concentrations exceed that allowed concentration, they will trigger mitigation measures. 

Mitigation is to follow EPA’s “herbicide mitigation strategy,” which provides a menu of options providing “flexibility” to pesticide applicators, with no incentive to adopt more ecologically-based approaches such as organic farming and land management. 

UPDATED: EPA is accepting comments on its proposal until April 5, 2025, through Regulations.gov.  

>> EPA must apply the standard of the Dacthal decision to atrazine and issue an emergency suspension and prohibit the use of existing stocks. 

Exposure to atrazine, manufactured by Syngenta, is widespread in the environment. According to EPA, “Pesticide products containing atrazine are registered for use on several agricultural crops, [including] field corn, sweet corn, sorghum, and sugarcane, []wheat, macadamia nuts, and guava, as well as non-agricultural uses such as nursery/ornamental and turf.” It is the second most widely used herbicide in the U.S. after glyphosate (found in Roundup), but banned in the European Union in 2004 and over 40 countries worldwide. Many organizations have called for the chemical to be banned in the U.S. and have joined in litigation against EPA. 

In the case of Dacthal, EPA used the “imminent hazard” clause of the federal pesticide law to immediately suspend the chemical’s use. At the same time, the agency is exercising its authority to prohibit the continued use of Dacthal’s existing stocks, a power that EPA rarely uses. The last time EPA issued an emergency action like this was in 1979 when the agency acknowledged miscarriages associated with the forestry use of the herbicide 2,4,5-T—one-half of the chemical weed killer Agent Orange, sprayed over people to defoliate the landscape of Vietnam in the war there—with the most potent form of dioxin, TCDD (2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin). The chemical manufacturer of Dacthal, AMVAC Chemical Corporation, can challenge the agency’s findings under the law and seek court review, but EPA’s action takes effect immediately while any appeal is considered. Meanwhile, EPA has stopped use under 7 U.S.C. 136 et seq., pursuant to section 6(c)(3) (7 U.S.C. 136d(c)(3)). (See Unit IV.) The prohibition on the use of existing stocks is mandated under Section 6(a)(1). 

The timeline for review and action on individual pesticides has taken decades since the 1972 overhaul of nation’s pesticide law, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). The law’s risk-benefit standard allows for high levels of harm, especially to farmworkers and those handling pesticides, as well as public exposure through residues in food, water, and air. EPA’s decisions are based on agency risk assessments that use flawed assumptions and ignore vulnerable populations like children and those with preexisting health conditions—like cancer, endocrine system disruption, neurological illness, and other health effects that are exacerbated by exposure. Amendments to FIFRA in 1996, in the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), have done little to reduce the ongoing reliance on toxic chemicals in food production and land management, despite the growth of the $70 billion organic industry—still not considered by EPA as a legitimate alternative to be evaluated when determining the “reasonableness” or “acceptability” of risk under pesticide law. Instead, EPA calculates acceptability of risk in the context of available alternative chemicals. In its press release on the Dacthal decision, EPA said, “In deciding whether to issue today’s Emergency Order, EPA consulted with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to understand how growers use DCPA and alternatives to this pesticide.” The agency’s consultation with USDA evaluated alternative chemicals, not alternative organic management systems and organic-compatible substances. 

The current mechanism that EPA uses to restrict pesticides—negotiated settlements instead of regulatory action—compromises the health of people and the environment, often disproportionately for people of color and workers, who are the first to be exposed as applicators or agricultural workers. Could the Dacthal decision be a watershed moment to change a regulatory process that allows daily pesticide exposure, poisoning, and contamination at rates that EPA deems acceptable—despite the overwhelming science linking real-world pesticide use (from homes to parks and playing fields, schools, and farms) to dreaded illnesses, biodiversity collapse, and the climate crisis? See Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database and the Pesticide Gateway. 

In making its decision to ban Dacthal, EPA states that it considered: 

1. The seriousness of the threatened harm; 
2. The immediacy of the threatened harm; 
3. The probability that the threatened harm will occur; 
4. The benefits to the public of the continued use of the pesticide; and 
5. The nature and extent of the information before the Agency at the time it makes a decision. 

These criteria could be met for most of the pesticides for which EPA has negotiated settlements with pesticide manufacturers, resulting in partial withdrawals of pesticides from the market and compromises that threaten health and the environment. 

Based on the reasoning in the Dacthal decision, EPA should ban atrazine. 

Atrazine poses immediate serious harms to people and the environment. 
Registration of the endocrine-disrupting herbicide propazine (in the triazine family of frog-deforming endocrine disruptors) was canceled by EPA, eliminating the use of the hazardous herbicide by the end of 2022. However, all pesticides in the triazine class, including atrazine and simazine, have similar properties and should be eliminated from use.

Under an Endangered Species Act review, initiated by EPA only after a lawsuit from health and environmental groups, the triazine chemicals were found to adversely affect a range of species. Propazine was found to harm 64 endangered species, while simazine and atrazine were both likely to harm over 50% of all endangered species and 40% of their critical habitats. EPA finds, “aquatic plant communities are impacted in many areas where atrazine use is heaviest, and there is a potential chronic risk to fish, amphibians, and aquatic invertebrates.” In addition, evidence shows that subsequent life stages or generations of fish are at greater risk of reproductive dysfunction after embryonic/early life exposure to atrazine. 

The triazine class of chemicals also pose significant threats to human health and are particularly concerning in the context of the range of chemicals one may be exposed to in today’s world. As Tyrone Hayes, PhD, University of California, Berkeley professor, noted at a presentation at Beyond Pesticides’ National Pesticide Forum, “Children in utero may be exposed to over 300 synthetic chemicals before they leave the womb… I would argue that a human fetus trapped in contaminated amniotic fluid is no different than one of my tadpoles trapped in a contaminated pond.”  

Atrazine has been linked to a range of adverse birth outcomes, including smaller body sizes, slower growth rates, and certain deformities like choanal atresia (where nasal passages are blocked at birth), and hypospadias (where the opening of a male’s urethra is not located at the tip of the penis). The mechanism of toxicity is perturbation of the neuroendocrine system by disrupting hypothalamic regulation of the pituitary, leading primarily to a disturbance in the ovulatory surge of luteinizing hormone (LH), which results in both reproductive and developmental alterations. Of the numerous adverse effects associated with this disruption, the two that appear to be the most sensitive and occur after the shortest duration (4 days) of exposure are the disruption of the ovarian cycles and the delays in puberty onset.

Despite these endocrine-disrupting effects, EPA reduces the margin of safety and underestimates exposure to children. 

Mitigation measures have not eliminated the harm. 
In November 2020, Beyond Pesticides and allied environmental groups launched a lawsuit against EPA for its intent to reregister the triazine family of chemicals. The agency’s interim approval of the herbicides, conducted under the Trump administration, eliminates important safeguards for children’s health and a monitoring program intended to protect groundwater from contamination. As is typical with EPA, the agency merely proposed minor label changes in attempts to mitigate risks identified in its registration review. According to a release from EPA, it made the decision not out of concerns relating to human health and environmental protection, but in order to provide “regulatory certainty” for farmers and local officials. 

Although a hefty 200,000 lbs. of propazine were used each year, mainly on sorghum in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, this amount pales in comparison to the over 70 million lbs. of atrazine used throughout the United States.

The public does not benefit from continued registration of atrazine. 
While industry consistently lines up local Congressmembers, former EPA officials, and agrichemical lobbyists to pressure EPA to keep triazines in the market, there is no evidence that the herbicides benefit the farmers these officials claim to represent. According to research published in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, banning atrazine would provide an economic benefit to farmers. “The winners,” the research concludes, “in an atrazine free future would include farm workers, farmers and their families, and others who are exposed to atrazine either directly from field uses or indirectly from contaminated tap water along with natural ecosystem that are currently damaged by atrazine.”  

EPA has sufficient information to cancel atrazine. 
EPA has long known about triazine’s threats to wildlife, including its ability to chemically castrate male frogs. However, the agency has consistently defended the chemical and sat by while independent researchers like Dr. Hayes, who conducted seminal research on atrazine’s endocrine-disrupting properties, are pilloried by chemical industry propaganda. In a Critical Perspectives piece published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Jason Rohr, PhD, provides an in-depth investigation of the atrazine controversy. 

“I argue that the atrazine controversy must be more than just a true story of cover-ups, bias, and vengeance,” he writes in the piece. “It must be used as an example of how manufacturing uncertainty and bending science can be exploited to delay undesired regulatory decisions and how greed and conflicts of interest—situations where personal or organizational considerations have compromised or biased professional judgment and objectivity—can affect environmental and public health and erode trust in the discipline of toxicology, science in general, and the honorable functioning of societies.” 

The Draft Ecological Risk Assessments for the Registration Review of Atrazine, Simazine, and Propazine dated October 5, 2016, found high risks that were supported by EPA’s assessments. EPA states, “Based on the results from hundreds of toxicity studies on the effects of atrazine on plants and animals, over 20 years of surface water monitoring data, and higher tier aquatic exposure models, this risk assessment concludes that aquatic plant communities are impacted in many areas where atrazine use is heaviest, and there is potential chronic risk to fish, amphibians, and aquatic invertebrates in these same locations. In the terrestrial environment, there are risk concerns for mammals, birds, reptiles, plants and plant communities across the country for many of the atrazine uses. EPA levels of concern for chronic risk are exceeded by as much as 22, 198, and 62 times for birds, mammals, and fish, respectively. For aquatic phase [stage] amphibians, a weight of evidence analysis concluded there is potential for chronic risks to amphibians based on multiple effects endpoint concentrations compared to measured and predicted surface water concentrations. The breadth of terrestrial plant species and families potentially impacted by atrazine use at current labeled rates, as well as reduced rates of 0.5 and 0.25 lbs. a.i./A, suggest that terrestrial plant biodiversity and communities are likely to be impacted from off-field exposures via runoff and spray drift. Average atrazine concentrations in water at or above 5 μg/L for several weeks are predicted to lead to reproductive effects in fish, while a 60-day average of 3.4 μg/L has a high probability of impacting aquatic plant community primary productivity, structure, and function.”  

The agency acknowledges many risks of concern associated with the uses of atrazine but asserts the remaining serious worker and ecological risks after the adoption of all proposed mitigation measures are outweighed by the benefits of atrazine use. EPA has determined that the chlorotriazines (triazines) and their three chlorinated metabolites share a common mechanism of toxicity, and as such, human health risks were assessed together through a triazine cumulative risk assessment. The mechanism of toxicity is perturbation of the neuroendocrine system by disrupting hypothalamic regulation of the pituitary, leading primarily to a disturbance in the ovulatory surge of luteinizing hormone (LH), which results in both reproductive and developmental alterations. Of the numerous adverse effects associated with this disruption, the two that appear to be the most sensitive and occur after the shortest duration (4 days) of exposure are the disruption of the ovarian cycles and the delays in puberty onset. Importantly, this perturbation manifests after short duration exposure with long-term life-cycle consequences, so it establishes both acute and chronic toxicity levels of concern (LOCs). 

Toxicity and exposure data available to EPA are sufficient to demonstrate that several atrazine uses exceed risk levels of concern. Exposures to children 1-2 years old playing on turf sprayed with atrazine exceed a risk estimate of concern for combined dermal and incidental oral exposures when assuming the maximum labeled rate for spray applications (2.0 lb ai/A). However, a screening aggregate assessment without the FQPA required safety factor was performed assuming that the application rate for turf is reduced to 1.0 lb ai/A, which would not be of concern for 4-day aggregate exposures. Even with this rate reduction, it can be presumed children are still at serious risk. For occupational handlers, EPA identified use scenarios that exceed risk concerns even with the maximum available personal protective equipment and/or engineering controls (proposed mitigation measures). 

Here is how EPA describes its truncated process for DCPA: 

In 2013, the agency issued a Data Call-In (DCI) to AMVAC Chemical Corporation, the sole manufacturer of DCPA, requiring it to submit more than 20 studies to support the existing registrations of DCPA. The required data included a comprehensive study of the effects of DCPA on thyroid development and function in adults and in developing young before and after birth, which was due by January 2016. Several of the studies that AMVAC submitted from 2013-2021 were considered insufficient to address the DCI, while the thyroid study and other studies were not submitted at all. 

In April 2022, EPA issued a very rarely used Notice of Intent to Suspend the DCPA technical-grade product (used to manufacture end-use products) based on AMVAC’s failure to submit the complete set of required data for almost 10 years, including the thyroid study. While AMVAC submitted the required thyroid study in August 2022, EPA suspended the registration based solely on AMVAC’s continued failure to submit other outstanding data on Aug. 22, 2023, following an administrative hearing.  In November 2023, the data submission suspension was lifted after AMVAC submitted sufficient data. Most DCPA use on turf was voluntarily canceled by AMVAC in December 2023, but unacceptable risks from other uses remained. 

As society and the global community struggle with petrochemical pesticides and their contribution to health threats, biodiversity collapse, and the climate emergency, EPA must acknowledge that Dacthal is one active ingredient among over 1,000 in 56,000 pesticide products whose uses can be eliminated by the use of organic systems that have now been shown to be effective.  

>> EPA must apply the standard of the Dacthal decision to atrazine and issue an emergency suspension and prohibit use of existing stocks. 

For more information on the dangers of atrazine and its chemical cousins, read Beyond Pesticides comments to EPA, and watch Tyrone Hayes, PhD, presentations from former National Pesticide Forum events on YouTube.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

(Beyond Pesticides, January 10, 2025) [Beyond Pesticides grieves for those tragically harmed by the Los Angeles fires.] As the new year begins with the bleak and devastating reminder brought on by the Los Angeles fires, the nation and world are reminded once again that dramatic land management changes are necessary to address the erratic weather conditions contributing to the force and effect of the fires and the length of the fire season. This is only the most recent reminder, as Beyond Pesticides and many organizations call for an urgent end to land management practices and inputs that rely on the production and use of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, which contribute to the global climate crisis. Often incorrectly referred to as natural disasters, environmental disasters, including fires, floods, and severe weather events, are brought on or exacerbated by widespread reliance on disruptive chemicals, which played a role in a delayed start to the southern California rainy season, hurricane-force winds, and low humidity levels—all elevated by climate change. As organic is increasingly understood to be a climate solution, OrganicClimateNet last year launched an aggressive effort to build the base of organic farmers in the European Union (EU).  

As the climate crisis grows exponentially, the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28) adopted an agreement with nearly 200 countries committing to the “end of the oil age.” (See UN Climate Crisis Conference Calls for Phaseout of Fossil Fuels, which Are Used to Produce Pesticides and Fertilizers.)

One of the largest barriers to expanding the adoption of organic farming, excluding costs, land access, and paperwork, is a deficiency of tailored mentorship and data collection to back up agroecological practices that critics may argue fall short of demonstrating climate, biodiversity, and public health benefits. OrganicClimateNet launched on February 1, 2024, as a European Union-based initiative coordinated by the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), with its seventeen European partners from fourteen EU member nations to develop a pilot network of 250 organic farmers across twelve EU countries.

This initiative supports the objectives of the European Green Deal, as well as EU Biodiversity for 2030 and Farm to Fork strategies, including the EU-wide target to transition 25% of EU farmland to certified organic by 2030.

In December 2023, The Rodale Institute states in its 2020 report, Regenerative Agriculture and the Soil Carbon Solution, that humans could sequester more than 100% of global, annual, human-caused CO₂ emissions if all arable and grasslands were transitioned to regenerative systems, and that “stable soil carbon can be built quickly enough to result in a rapid drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” The organization adds to that the importance of shifting to organic regenerative systems, a distinction Beyond Pesticides has emphasized.

The goal of the OrganicClimateNet strategy is to boost domestic organic farming amidst increasing consumer interest in access to regenerative organic food products. In the U.S. context, the Organic Transition Initiative, including the Transition to Organic Partnership Program (TOPP), is a similar avenue for expanding organic capacity, as well as continuing to push for 100% reimbursement of certification costs (Organic Cost Share), among other support policies, as a baseline for funding.

OrganicClimateNET & EU Organic Action Plan

OrganicClimateNET is funded with 4.9 million euros from Horizon Europe and Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation (SERI) through 2028. The project partners are a consortium of organic farmer associations, higher education and research institutions, and farming advisors, including  FiBL Europe (Belgium), Institut de l’Elevage (France), Justus-Liebig-Universitaet Giessen (Germany), IFOAM Organics EU (Belgium), Innovarum (Spain), Instytut Genetyki i Biotechnologii Zwierzat Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Poland), Asociacion Ecovalia (Spain), Luomuliito (Finland), Irish Organic Association (Ireland), Bioland Beratung GmbH (Germany), AGROBIO (Portugal), Asociatia Inter-Bio (Romania), LLKC (Latvia), Italian Foundation for Research in Organic and Biodynamic Agriculture FIRAB (Italy), Stichting Louis Bolk Instiut (The Netherlands), CEET (Estonia) and FiBL CH (Switzerland).

The four overarching goals of this Network according to their website are:

1. To engage farmers in climate organic farming;
2. To enhance capacity for climate organic farming;
3. To develop smart policies & consumer engagement; and
4. To foster a climate-neutral and resilient Europe.

The Network will leverage the cumulative capacity of the various partner organizations to organize and develop baseline tools, deliver data and impact reports to policymakers, and communicate with the general public, and incorporate the goals and objectives of related EU-climate, environmental, biodiversity, and food systems-related projects. The six “work packages” represent six phases of the Network’s rollout over the course of the 2024-2028 cycle, including:

1. Establishing the pilot network;
2. Implementing Carbon Farming;
3. Carbon Farming Knowledge Base;
4. Supporting Policy Design;
5. Dissemination & Communication; and
6. Management & Collaboration.

Each of the twelve countries will be organized into national Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (nAKISs). A nAKIS has a national coordinator, hub coaches, and lighthouse farms. The lighthouse farm at each Hub will “serv[e] as a demonstration and test center for project inputs such as training, translated knowledge material or carbon assessments.” The plan is to establish two hubs in each country with approximately 10-12 farms engaged in each hub.

Through OrganicClimateNET’s news page, several hubs have been launched in Romania, Italy, and Poland. For example in Poland, Tomasz Sakowski of the Institute of Animal Genetics and Biotechnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences is the national coordinator working with Bożena Holak (Poland’s hub coach) to develop two hubs in northeastern provinces known to have a robust organic dairy sector. “The chosen hubs will supply milk to the Piątnica dairy, which boasts the largest number of organic milk suppliers in the region,” according to a July update on the news page.

This project comes at a moment when the European Union is struggling to meet its 2030 target of 25% organic, given that the 2022 Eurostat data released on June 19, 2024, finds that just 10.5% of total EU farmland is under organic farming. See previous Daily News here for more analysis concerning some of the factors that contribute to Europe’s lackluster progress.

OrganicClimateNET is one of several EU-funded initiatives aimed at expanding organic agriculture in Europe. OrganicTargets4EU tracks opportunities and obstacles to meet EU and member state-specific national organic targets in the service of fulfilling the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies. There are seven focus countries for agriculture (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Romania) and two focus countries (Germany and Greece) for organic aquaculture aimed at providing diverse data from different EU geographical and bioclimatic contexts, as well as varying levels of development of organic supply chains and consumer demand. Additionally, through the facilitation and curation of Organic Knowledge Hubs, farmers, advocates, journalists, policymakers, the general public, and other stakeholders can access data, studies, and other information relating to crop production, animal husbandry, food chain management, environment and society, and farm management.

Keeping Organic Strong in the United States

OrganicClimateNET’s goals of enhancing peer-to-peer mentorship, data collection and analysis for soil health and carbon sequestration-related outcomes in organic farming, and development of context-specific resources and tools for farmers who may otherwise not pursue organic certification are acknowledged by U.S. organic advocates and farmers as excellent examples of policy strategies that can be applied stateside.

The state of organic knowledge gathering in the U.S. falls short of the European Union’s progress, despite the opportunities that exist. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture has two grant programs for organic farmers and researchers, including the Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative (OREI) and the Organic Transition Initiative. There are also organizations such as Real Organic Project and Organic Farming and Research Foundation (OFRF) [a National Organic Coalition member alongside Beyond Pesticides and other organizations] that offer funding, produce research, facilitate peer-to-peer networks, and provide related resources to build engagement in the U.S. organic farming sector.

The Organic Transition Initiative (OTI), which provides $300 million in funding and crop insurance, as well as network building through the Transition to Organic Partnership Program (TOPP), is the closest equivalent to the European Union capacity-building model. Terry Shistar, PhD, science advisor and board member of Beyond Pesticides, shared testimony to the National Organics Standards Board fall 2023 meeting expressing concerns about the rollout of TOPP and OTI. “[T]he challenges in administering this program have resulted in low participation by farmers because of the very limited window of time for rollout and recruitment. For instance, the time from the announcement of OTI-EQIP [Environmental Quality Incentives Program] funding to the deadline was less than a month, resulting in few new applications,” says Shistar. See the full comments here. See previous Daily News here for more information on OTI and TOPP.

The National Organic Coalition released a press release this week voicing the concerns of advocates and farmers that organic programs were left defunded after government shutdown negotiations in late December 2024 put them on the chopping block. These programs include:

1. The Organic Certification Cost Share Program

2. The Organic Data Initiative

3. The Organic Certification Trade and Tracking Program

See Keeping Organic Strong to learn more about the history of U.S. organic regulations. As mandated in the Organic Food Production Act (OFPA), the National Organic Standards Board is required to hold public hearings twice a year for open comment periods on organic standards, including updates from subcommittees on a plethora of focus areas including the sunset of materials on the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances, equity and barriers to access organic certification, development of new regulations, among other areas. 

Contact your Senator and U.S. House Representative to support S.5084, Safe School Meals Act, which would expand funding for organic school lunches, fully compensate organic farmers for certification fees, and prohibit paraquat, glyphosate, organophosphates, and other toxic chemical residues in food procured for the National School Lunch Program.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Source: FiBL

(Beyond Pesticides, January 9, 2025) In a Frontiers in Public Health review article, researchers report on the wide body of science connecting adverse effects to female reproductive system, such as infertility, with exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). The authors call these effects a significant concern for public health, as there has been growing evidence of EDCs with risk factors for decreased fertility.  

Infertility “affects a substantial proportion of the world’s population with approximately one in six people affected,” the researchers note. They continue: “Over the last 70 years, global fertility has been constantly in decline due to behavioral and societal changes… [E]merging evidence has shown that infertility incidence is linked to exposure to environmental factors such as tobacco, alcohol, and a wide range of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) including pesticides (chlorpyrifos, glyphosate, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane [DDT] and methoxychlor), phthalates, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), dioxins, and bisphenols.” 

In this review, over 100 studies are summarized to showcase the link between EDC exposure and reproductive effects in women, including infertility and related diseases such as endometriosis, premature ovarian insufficiency (POI), and endocrine axis dysregulation. The studies included investigating the “mechanisms by which EDCs cause ovarian aging, folliculogenesis, decrease of oocyte quality, ovulation disorders, development and receptivity of endometrium, endometriosis, fetal development abnormalities, and epigenetics modulation,” the authors state. 

Results from these studies show exposure to EDCs can lead to infertility and reproductive effects through various mechanisms. Altering the balance of any endocrines that impact reproduction can change fertilization outcomes. The researchers say, “One of the most described mechanisms is when EDCs mimic hormones such as estrogen and bind to their receptors leading to hormonal disruption.” This can alter the ovulation process. 

The authors note: “Additionally, oxidative stress in ovarian tissues, that damages cells and impairs their function, is induced by several EDCs. Thus, EDCs disrupt the development of ovarian follicles and can be directly toxic to gametes, decreasing their numbers and quality… These mechanisms all together lead to abnormalities such as blocked Fallopian tubes, ovarian disorder, uterine disorders, failure to produce an oocyte, abnormal oocyte quality, local inflammation, and endocrine disorders in women.” 

Among the studies, findings include: 

• Pesticide exposure in agricultural regions is “linked with fertility decline, poor IVF outcomes, such as POI, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and endometriosis.” 

• EDCs “influence the fertilization process in women by different means. If the oocyte cannot mature, due to an early ovarian aging, impaired folliculogenesis or cannot be expelled due to anovulation, the fertilization cannot occur. Moreover, if the released oocyte quality is impaired due to altered maturation, the fertilization can occur, but oocytes with cytoplasmic anomalies will lead to significantly lower pregnancy rates.” 

• Atrazine, a widely used herbicide, is “a common environmental contaminant known with EDC effect and reproductive toxicity.” 

• Endosulfan exposure “reduces the expression of the primary endometrial markers of receptivity (such as MUC1, HOXA10, Inn and E-cadherin) and affects the normal endometrial receptivity impairing the adhesion and the implantation process of the blastocyst.” 

• Placenta anomalies, which lead to pre-eclampsia, abnormal fetal development, miscarriage, and placental disruption, can occur with EDC exposure as the “placenta is vulnerable to endocrine disruption due to a large presence of hormone receptors and a lack of enzymatic machinery to guard against EDCs.” This study also finds that organochlorine pesticides “impair placenta ability to produce and release hormones and enzymes, transport nutrients, or produce waste. They contribute to preterm birth by disrupting the balance between P4 and E2 during pregnancy.” 

• Epigenetic patterns can be deregulated “by altering methylation enzymes (DNMTs) and DNA demethylation enzymes (e.g., ten-eleven translocation TET proteins)” from EDC exposure. 

• Methoxychlor and DDT gestational exposure correlates to ovary diseases (studies here and here). 

• DDT is also “linked to impaired fetal growth, and metabolic dysfunction which can possibly lead to miscarriage.” 

• “[A[lmost all major classes of EDCs can target the estrogen pathways as many EDCs display estrogenic activity, and can affect both genetic and epigenetic levels.” (See studies here, here, and here.) 

As the researchers conclude from these results, “The impact of EDCs extends beyond lowering the rate of a successful pregnancy and increasing the risk of miscarriage in women; they also impair the future reproductive health of the fetus.” Infants and children are at a disproportionate risk with pesticide exposure as this is a critical developmental window.  

Chemical exposure during this window can lead to lasting health effects into adulthood. The authors note that “the reach of EDCs to the embryo by transplacental transfer can lead to genome alteration during embryonic germ cell precursors reprogramming… These epigenetic modulations by EDCs suggest serious long-term effects on human reproductive health and fertility decline.” Studies find that EDC exposure within the “first 1,000 days of life increases the risk of developing pathologies in adulthood.” (See studies here and here.) 

As Beyond Pesticides has previously reported, the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences explains endocrine disruptors this way: “Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are natural or human-made chemicals that may mimic, block, or interfere with the body’s hormones, which are part of the endocrine system. These chemicals are associated with a wide array of health issues. . . Endocrine glands, distributed throughout the body, produce the hormones that act as signaling molecules after release into the circulatory system. The human body is dependent on hormones for a healthy endocrine system, which controls many biological processes like normal growth, fertility, and reproduction.” 

With the ubiquitous use of EDCs, exposure to the general population occurs through contact with contaminated food, soil, and air. Studies continue to link EDCs with cancer, cardiovascular risk, behavioral disorders, autoimmune abnormalities, and reproductive disorders (see here, here, here, and here). These effects are seen in higher rates in areas with increased EDC production and pesticide usage, with chemical industry workers and farmworkers having the most exposure. 

To abate these impacts, especially in areas with agricultural EDC exposure, organic land management can be implemented. In adopting this holistic solution, farmworker exposure is reduced, and food crops are safer and healthier to eat. Organic agriculture provides both health and environmental benefits, and mitigates the ongoing climate and biodiversity crises. 

To learn more about endocrine disruption, listen to keynote speaker Tracey Woodruff, PhD from the second session of the 41st National Forum Series — Imperatives for a Sustainable Future. Additional Daily News coverage can also be found here. 

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.  

Source: 

Tricotteaux-Zarqaoui, S. et al. (2024) Endocrine disruptor chemicals exposure and female fertility declining: from pathophysiology to epigenetic risks, Frontiers in Public Health. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11672798/. 

(Beyond Pesticides, January 8, 2024) On the brink of the second Trump administration, a legal victory just last month overturned a rule issued under the first Trump administration to “practically eliminate oversight of novel GE technology and instead let industry self-regulate,” as characterized by the Center for Food Safety (CFS). CFS served as counsel in the case for the plaintiffs, led by the National Family Farm Coalition. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California decision, responding to the lawsuit filed in 2021 on behalf of farm and environmental groups, remanded the case back to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) with instructions to follow. “This is a critical victory on behalf of farmers, the planet, and scientific integrity,” says George Kimbrell, legal director at the Center for Food Safety, also a plaintiff in the case. Mr. Kimbrell continued, “USDA tried to hand over its job to Monsanto and the pesticide industry and the Court held that capitulation contrary to both law and science.” It remains to be seen whether the incoming Trump administration will appeal this court decision.

Unpacking The Center for Food Safety Litigation

This legal battle began in 2004 with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announcing that it would revisit rulemaking on the governance of genetically engineered organisms. In 2008, APHIS published a notice of this proposed rulemaking that resulted in the final rule in 2020. Center for Food Safety filed the lawsuit in 2021.

The court agreed with litigants that USDA violated various keystone environmental statutes, including the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and the Plant Protection Act (PPA). [Passed by Congress in 2000, PPA consolidated the regulatory system for genetic engineering into one unitary framework combining various other previous laws.] Ultimately, the court determined that APHIS—the leading USDA agency assessing potential harms of GE crops—made “significant” errors regarding PPA and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). “Summary judgment is granted to plaintiffs on the PPA-based APA claim that it was arbitrary and capricious for APHIS to not incorporate its noxious-weed authority in the final rule and to implement the conventional-breeding exemptions,” reads the summary judgment, written by U.S. District Judge Hon. James Donato.

Unpacking this ruling, the court finds that APHIS acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” in regard to PPA’s statutory mandate on noxious-weed authority (a.k.a. management of invasive plants and weeds) as well as attempting “to implement the conventional-breeding exemptions.”

Relating to noxious weed authority, the court finds that “ignoring concerns the agency [APHIS] had previously recognized is not reasoned decision-making’” in highlighting “APHIS’s failure to address the limitations in the part 360 regulations with respect to GE plants that its prior assessments identified as justifying adding noxious weeds as a trigger to part 340 regulations was arbitrary and capricious.”

Relating to breeding exemptions, “Nowhere in the final rule does APHIS acknowledge the conflicting scientific evidence concerning the basis on which the exemption is premised,” says Judge Donato. This, he refers to as “arbitrary and capricious.”

A Game of Hot Potato: History of GE Litigation and Rulemaking

In 2019, USDA under the first Trump Administration proposed new rulemaking that would exempt almost all GE crops from regulation and allow the company that makes them to decide whether they are safe. In a petition submitted to the Federal Register that year, USDA Must Offer Basic Protection from Genetically Engineered Organisms, over six thousand comments were submitted by members of the public on varying sides of these issues. Environmental, public health, and consumer safety organizations, including Beyond Pesticides, urged that APHIS regulations should:

• Base the regulation of GE organisms on the unique hazards they present;
• Include “synthetic biology” in the definition of regulated genetic engineering;
• Prohibit developers from exempting themselves from regulation;
• Regulate plant-made pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals (PMPIs);
• Ensure that plant incorporated protectants (PIPs) are regulated at all scales;
• Address hazards other than “plant pest” risks, including: The unwelcome presence of GE genes in neighboring fields of organic or identity-preserved crops, the creation of new compounds in a plant formed in the plant’s detoxification of herbicides, the movement of genes for manufacture of industrial or pharmaceutical chemicals into crop plants, the creation of “superweeds” (plant pests) through selection for resistance to herbicides continually used on GE crops, the overuse of herbicides in cropping systems dependent on the use of herbicides sprayed over herbicide-tolerant crops, destruction of habitat adjacent to farm fields by overuse of nonselective herbicides sprayed over herbicide-tolerant crops, selection for resistance in insects targeted by PIPs, reduction in populations of insects due to effects of PIPs and destruction of habitat adjacent to fields sprayed by nonselective herbicides over herbicide-tolerant crops, and health effects suffered by those exposed to excessive use of herbicides.

The labeling requirement, in conjunction with the first Trump Administration’s National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Law (See Daily News review here and here), mandated that genetically engineered foods bear labels that indicate that they have been “bioengineered,” provide a text-message phone number or display a QR code to access further information. (“Additional options such as a phone number or web address were available to small food manufacturers or for small and very small packages.”) According to an agency spokesperson, the rule is designed to “balance the need to provide information to consumers with the interest in minimizing costs to companies.” Advocates and communities arrived at different conclusions. (See here for previous Daily News.)

Associated Threats Relating to GE Products

Organic advocates and farmers view federal decision-making, regardless of Republican or Democrat-run administrations, as inadequate to protect against GE contamination and subsequent health risks. Look no further than the Biden Administration-published report that promotes genetic engineering, “The Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology – Plan for Regulatory Reform under the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology.” (See Daily News here.)

Going further, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-approved the introduction of millions of GE mosquitoes in California and Florida (See Daily News here) alongside the continuous use of prophylactic synthetic insecticide spraying (including sumithirin and bifenthrin) amid outbreaks of deadly arborviruses such as West Nile and Eastern Equine Encephalitis (see Beyond Pesticides press release here and associated Action of the Week here) exacerbates insect and weed resistance to toxic chemicals and pesticides. Public health professionals and wildlife and ecosystem stewards alike, not to mention local communities across the country, continue to hold concerns that industry is creating the same problems they wish to solve for the sake of profit and at the expense of public well-being.

For more coverage of regulatory decision-making and litigation, see Daily News sections on litigation, genetic engineering, and USDA. Are you continuing to feel frustrated about the direction of food safety and health of your communities going into 2025? Consider subscribing to Action of the Week to voice your concerns directly to decision-makers. You can start with the following action telling USDA, FDA, and EPA to replace agricultural provisions in the Framework with policies that discourage GE crops and promote organic agriculture.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Source: Center for Food Safety

(Beyond Pesticides, January 7, 2025) A report, released in December 2024 from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), confronts the problem of “siloing” environmental elements—food, health, water, biodiversity and climate change—when they instead intersect at a nexus from which each element affects all the others. The problem is essentially that all the elements are part of the same crisis, yet actions to address issues within each—and, importantly, to resist addressing them—are dealt with in isolation. A proper perspective, gleaned from the report, is to view each element from the center where all parts meet, thus addressing the issues in coordination.

According to the IPBES report, “[F]ragmented governance of biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change with different institutions and actors often working on disconnected and siloed policy agendas, resulting in conflicting objectives and duplication of efforts.” The IPBES is an independent body analogous to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but structured similarly and in close contact with the United Nations (UN). The new report comes at the behest of IPBES’s 147 member countries—75 percent of the UN’s membership—to address the interconnections among the five global crises.

The report strongly demonstrates that a holistic, globe-spanning frame of mind must be adopted to cope with the global crisis. For example, human health cannot be separated from healthy food production practices and clean water. Nor can the effects of climate change and biodiversity on human health and the food supply be ignored. IPBES stresses that without coordination, improvement in one area can damage conditions in another area, resulting in tradeoffs and unintended consequences that impede actual progress. Feedback loops can amplify tradeoffs, for instance through attempts to couple soil carbon capture with energy production, causing environmental deterioration. But if beneficial changes in, say, food production, are coordinated with beneficial changes in water management, the effects can be synergistic in a positive way for all the elements.

Beyond Pesticides supports the increased application of organic agriculture as a primary way of integrating solutions to each of the elements now treated in isolation. Organic protects biodiversity, preserves water quality, protects food quality and therefore human health, and mitigates climate change. The IPBES report stresses that current “food first” approaches to agriculture prioritize food production using energy-intensive, polluting and toxic methods, which improves nutritional health but relies on what IPBES calls “unsustainable intensification and increased per capita consumption.” Beyond Pesticides’ advocacy for nature-based solutions, such as protecting pollinators, discouraging monoculture, eliminating pesticides, and enhancing soil health, improve the food element while also being synergistic with other parts of the nexus.

IPBES also emphasizes that there are countervailing forces rooted in short-term financial gains for “a small number of people while ignoring [the] negative impacts” that affect “the well-being of some more than others.” For example, “[I]ncreases in unsustainable food production have been associated with land conversion and the expansion of unsustainable agricultural practices, particularly driven by affluence. Such practices have led to biodiversity loss, reduced water availability and quality, increases in greenhouse gas emissions and [increased risk] of pathogen emergence.” In other words, an economy that produces affluence for its own sake destroys the global system that produces life. And the affluence is generally confined to a very small stratum of humanity, leaving the consequences to the least affluent.

Such economic drivers are considered indirect influences on global environmental degradation. In fact, the trends in indirect drivers are nearly the exact opposite of trends in the nexus elements. Gross domestic product, exports, population growth and urbanization increased dramatically between 1970 and 2020, while freshwater availability and species survival plunged and climate-related disasters spiked.

The IBPES report also notes that “Global agrobiodiversity, including genetic resources for food and agriculture, is declining (with global food production heavily dependent on just 9 crop species that contribute to 65 per cent of the world’s crop production.” Nor has increased food production improved nutritional quality. And human health is certainly not improving. According to the report: “Unsustainable farming systems contribute to biodiversity loss, excessive water use, pollution and climate change, which further exacerbates health problems. Increased air and water pollution caused an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2019 (16 per cent of all deaths worldwide) through diseases such as respiratory disease, cancer, allergies, birth defects, neurodegenerative disease and impaired cognitive development. Emerging and reemerging infectious disease events have been rising, with half of these driven by changes in land use, agricultural practices and activities that encroach on natural habitats and lead to increased contact between wildlife, domestic animals and humans. . . Transforming to more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable food systems would deliver multiple benefits to the nexus elements and would help countries address land conversion and unsustainable agricultural practices.”

The report estimates that over half of global gross domestic product (GDP), $58 trillion in 2023, is generated by economic sectors moderately or highly dependent on nature. At the same time, externalities—costs not accounted for in the economic calculus—include $10-25 trillion of negative effects of fossil fuels and harmful practices in agriculture and fisheries, $5.3 trillion in private sector financing of such negatives, and public subsidies incentivizing the negatives. One of the obvious implications of the IPBES report is that there is no such thing as an externality when it comes to calculating the costs and benefits of a functioning ecosphere.

The report also constructs six approaches it calls “archetypes” and ranks them according to their synergistic positive outcomes on human health: nature-oriented, a balance of nexuses, conservation first, climate first, food first and nature overexploitation. The top three are the nature-oriented, balanced, and conservation first archetypes. IPBES unequivocally selects the “nature-oriented nexus” as the strongest positive outcome and, not coincidentally, the approach that provides the most synergy among the five elements of climate, biodiversity, water, food and human health. The nature-oriented nexus” emphasizes strong environmental regulation, sustainable agricultural practices, lower rates of global per capita consumption, and strong development of green technologies.”

At the bottom, privileging food, climate, and nature exploitation produce the worst outcomes. Only emphasizing the simultaneous and coordinated policies and practices will accomplish the goals of each individual nexus.

This could be counterintuitive for advocates of organic and regenerative agriculture, unless the goal contains an understanding of the interdependent, interactive nature of the nexus elements, and of the possibility of positive or negative reinforcements and feedbacks. Unless carefully constructed, a food first scenario might include harmful expansion of fossil fuel use, greenhouse gas emissions, and fertilizer pollution. In other words, in order to avoid negative consequences for both food and the other global elements, food production must abandon conventional agriculture’s dependence on highly industrialized products, many of its practices, and possibly some of its foundational political and economic supports. For example, as Beyond Pesticides has shown, courts tend to balance allegations of pesticide harms against corporations’ right to make a profit. This is itself an extreme imbalance of the values that make human life sustainable.

Beyond Pesticides strongly supports the de-siloing of the five nexus elements discussed in the IPBES report and has provided detailed information about the interdependencies of biodiversity, food, climate, water and human health for decades. Beyond Pesticides’ Annual Report for 2023-2024 details not only o organization’s communication of news and the latest science, but how this foundation provides support for actions aimed at changing not only agricultural and land management practices but also corporate accountability and public policy decision-making.

Biodiversity in Land Management Integral to Sustainability, in the winter 2016-2017 issues of Pesticides and You provides a deep analysis of the damage that monoculture and pesticides do to biodiversity, and the many ways that biodiversity-aware agriculture, such as cover crops, interbedding pollinator-friendly plants with food crops, and crop rotation can combat that damage. A June 2024 Daily News highlights a study showing that pesticides contaminate aquatic algae, triggering cascade effects through all trophic levels. These in turn affect four important elements: water, biodiversity, human health and food.

The report concludes that: “[S]ustainable healthy diets, reduced food loss and waste and ecological intensification and sustainable intensification of agriculture and ecosystem restoration can be combined (i.e., bundled together) and incentivized and driven by behaviour change to reduce land conversion and water pollution, halt or reverse biodiversity loss, improve human health, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Some response options in and of themselves are similar to bundles in that they comprise multiple synergistic actions, such as Indigenous food systems that emerge from Indigenous and local knowledge and traditional practices and which are based on holistic worldviews.”

Beyond Pesticides has highlighted numerous examples of purported climate-friendly agricultural technologies that do far more harm than good. A good example from the November 15, 2024 Daily News exposes how schemes to yoke carbon capture to energy generation in agriculture can lead to disaster. Organic agriculture can preserve and rebuild soil carbon without using biofuels such as biochar and ethanol, both of which have major downsides. The connections between agricultural chemicals and damage to human health fill the scientific literature and is captured in Beyond Pesticides’ Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database.

Making this change can seem overwhelming given the economic and political trends of the moment. However, there are many ways to implement progressive policies—what the report calls “response options”—short of convincing recalcitrant politicians and business tycoons at national and international levels. The report also notes that there are already three important international agreements: the Sustainable Development Goals, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and the Paris Agreement, that will be strengthened and advanced by IPBES’s 71 recommended response options.

The report contains a helpful figure (SPM.7, p.23) showing how particular applications in a broad category like coordinating planning and governance policies, can include development of city region food systems, which in turn contributes to the element “food” and mitigates climate change in coordination with various other steps like integrating watershed and health interventions, making urban infrastructure water-sensitive, and so on.

Thus, there are numerous granular projects that can be implemented without having to move the needle at the macro level. Local changes can “emerge from coordinated networks by drawing on social knowledge and integrating actions across sectors by increasing collaboration among diverse actors.” Beyond Pesticides’ Parks for a Sustainable Future program illustrates steps that can be taken at the local level to eliminate the use of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizer. The IPBES report places great emphasis on urban nature-based solutions. A World Wildlife Fund report highlights cities that have adopted such solutions by building greenways, swales, green roofs and many other landscape changes that mitigate natural disaster impacts, clean polluted water, remove atmospheric carbon, provide human health benefits, and foster biodiversity. These are steps that can take place locally and regionally even if the national wheels of progress are grinding slowly or in reverse.

The current health, biodiversity, and climate crises are the most profound problems humanity has yet encountered and calls for dismantling siloes, integrating knowledge among disciplines and between actions, and committing to changing some of our most basic beliefs and dogmas. This is not an optional process; it is life or death, not only for human civilization but for the environmental processes that sustain it. But we can take beneficial steps across the broad spectrum of human activity as long as we consider their effects on the multiple health and environmental elements that intersect, and keep our eyes on the prize of a healthy, abundant, and sustainable planet.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Sources:

Summary for policymakers of the thematic assessment of the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health (nexus assessment)
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
ADVANCE UNEDITED VERSION
16 December 2024
https://ipbes.canto.de/pdfviewer/viewer/viewer.html?v=IPBES11Media&portalType=v%2FIPBES11Media&column=document&id=cj0uc5396d1ed5418tsuic2r45&suffix=pdf&print=1

Scientists from 57 countries want to end siloed decision-making on climate and biodiversity
Joseph Winters
Grist Dec 18, 2024
https://grist.org/solutions/ipbes-un-panel-biodiversity-ecosystem-services-nexus-report-namibia/

IPBES: Tackle Together Five Interlinked Global Crises in Biodiversity, Water, Food, Health and Climate Change
Media Release: IPBES Nexus Assessment
16 December 2024
https://www.ipbes.net/nexus/media-release

Business As Usual “Carbon Capture” Undermines Organic Land Management as a Climate Solution
Beyond Pesticides, November 15, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/11/business-as-usual-carbon-capture-undermines-transition-to-organic-land-management-as-a-climate-solution/

(Beyond Pesticides, January 6, 2025) With the incoming U.S. president promising the “most aggressive regulatory reduction” ever seen in the country’s history, attention shifts to local and state governments’ responsibility to protect health and the environment. While the reliance on local governments to fill the gaps left by deficient federal action is not new, the U.S. system of federalism has historically and constitutionally required a sharing of powers from local to state to federal, with a reliance on agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish a basic level of protections. While the role of local and state governments has been critical to ensuring environmental and public health protection when scientific findings have shown federal action to be inadequate, the new administration has outlined a course that suggests an increasingly important role for local and state governments. As Beyond Pesticides has reported, “Mr. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” has targeted “every one” of Mr. Biden’s policies designed to transition the United States away from fossil fuels,” according to The New York Times. This is happening as the country and world face serious catastrophic threats of ongoing and escalating health, biodiversity, and climate crises.

In this context, a piece published by Harvest Public Media at the end of December, captures the power of individuals and communities working together to adopt a rather simple change that is crosscutting in its effect on the current and growing health, biodiversity, and climate crises—transitioning parks and public spaces to organic practices. For environmental and public health advocates, this is a bright spot in responding to the crises with practical steps. The article, “These Midwest cities are cutting pesticides from public parks with the help of a national nonprofit,” highlights the work of Jen Schroeder, a mother of two children in Kansas City, who wants, simply, her neighborhood park where her children play to be free of toxic chemical use. She saw a flier in her local Natural Grocers grocery store about Beyond Pesticides’ Parks for a Sustainable Future Program, reached out to her Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department, and now the city is moving ahead to transition two pilot sites to organic practices. It happened with a simple reaching out to the Parks Department. With the hands-on assistance of Beyond Pesticides, Parks Departments receive a plan and training from a horticulturist and learn about organic practices that can be applied across all parks and public spaces. (More information on the Parks Program is available here.)

In its Action of Week this week, Beyond Pesticides is urging people to become a part of the Parks Program and ask their Mayor, in the new year, to adopt a policy and program for organic management of your community’s parks and public spaces. 

In protecting children using their community parks, the organic land management program is creating models for cost-effective programs that meet community expectations, while eliminating the use of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers. When combined with the growth of certified organic agriculture, the conversion of land management to organic eliminates the petrochemicals associated with endocrine disruption (see a talk by Tracey Woodruff, PhD here) and rising rates of related illnesses, biodiversity decline, and an escalating climate crisis. As the climate crisis causes increasingly erratic weather, more frequent flooding, and widespread fires, organic soil management draws down atmospheric carbon, which reduces the threat of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate disasters. Also, see the effects of synthetic fertilizers. 

Given the political context, advocates see this as a critical time to engage in efforts to advance organic, from choices in diet, lawn and landscape care, or community involvement. Beyond Pesticides provides more on the reasons why: 

1. Health and Safety: Organic foods and parks are free from harmful pesticides, fossil-fuel-based substances, and toxic chemicals, making them safer and healthier for all ages. Visit Beyond Pesticide’s 40 Common Lawn and Landscape Chemicals page to learn more about the health impacts of pesticides in communities. See how you can manage your landscape without petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers. 
2. Environmental Stewardship: Organic land management supports practices that protect pollinators, improve soil health, increase biodiversity, and reduce toxic runoff into water bodies. Learn more about how to protect pollinators by reading BEE Protective. 
3. Trust and Transparency: The USDA Certified Organic label ensures strict standards and regulations for organic products, providing trust and transparency for consumers worldwide. We provide oversight for parks that use organic land management. Visit Beyond Pesticide’s literature called Save Our Organic to learn more about the power of the organic label and use our Keeping Organic Strong page to keep USDA accountable to the principles and values in the Organic Foods Production Act. 
4. Just Communities: Supporting organic farming practices can benefit local communities and economies, as well as promote responsible animal welfare and fair labor conditions. Organic parks are the ethical choice to promote environmental justice. The Black Institute’s Poison Parks report shines a spotlight on New York City’s previous reliance on glyphosate-based herbicides and that people of color communities, including landscapers, bear the burden of this toxic chemical’s impact. 
5. Climate Resilience: Organic farming often exhibits better performance during droughts and challenging environmental conditions. Watering needs are very site-specific and the type of soil impacts drainage. Once established, a deep root system from organic land management requires less water and results in the drawn down of atmospheric carbon, contributing to efforts to reduce the adverse effects of carbon on climate. 

Ask your Mayor, in the new year, to adopt a policy and program for organic management of your community’s parks and public spaces. 

Letter to Mayor
I am writing to urge you to use your leadership in the new year to require as a matter of policy and practice the organic management of our community parks and public spaces. My concern about the management of public spaces—used by children and families, those with health vulnerabilities, pets, and wildlife—stems from the hazardous nature of the petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers commonly used. The adverse health and environmental effects are captured on two factsheets, 40 Commonly Used Lawn Pesticides (bp-dc.org/lawnfactsheets). With this information, we urge you to advance a policy and management decision to stop the use of these hazardous chemicals and transition our parks to organic practices.

The factsheets document, with scientific citations, a wide range of diseases and ecological effects linked to pesticides. The underlying analysis identified in the factsheets are based on toxicity determinations in government reviews and university studies and databases.

Of the 40 most commonly used lawn and landscape pesticides, in reference to adverse health effects, 26 are possible and/or known carcinogens, 24 have the potential to disrupt the endocrine (hormonal) system, 29 are linked to reproductive effects and sexual dysfunction, 21 have been linked to birth defects, 24 are neurotoxic, 32 can cause kidney or liver damage, and 33 are sensitizers and/or irritants. Regarding adverse environmental effects, 21 are detected in groundwater, 24 have the ability to leach into drinking water sources, 39 are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms vital to our ecosystem, 33 are toxic to bees, 18 are toxic to mammals, and 28 are toxic to birds.

In adopting organic land management, our community can make an important contribution to solving the threat that petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers are to biodiversity collapse and the climate crisis. The 2022 United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warns that we must adopt policies and practices that reflect the value of Nature’s biodiversity, including pollinators, in supporting human life and activity. This starts with the management of soil and landscapes in our community.

As the climate crisis causes increasingly erratic weather, more frequent flooding, and widespread fires, organic soil management draws down atmospheric carbon, which reduces the threat of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate disasters. Organic management of our parks enables our community to contribute to solving this existential crisis and elevates our role in climate action.

Please take advantage of Beyond Pesticides’ offer to assist you and land managers of our community parks in the adoption of organic land management practices through its Parks for a Sustainable Future program. You can contact them at [email protected].

I look forward to your reply and working with you in the new year.

(Beyond Pesticides, January 3, 2025) Pesticides that are sprayed and become airborne significantly disrupt ecological balances and affect nontarget species that are crucial for maintaining biodiversity, according to an article in Environmental Pollution. In this review of studies throughout countries in North and South America, Europe, and Asia, among others, researchers from Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Poland reinforce the science about pesticides’ direct effect on species and the cascading effects of pesticide drift through various trophic levels within food webs that lead to overall devasting population effects.

This study “addresses the interconnectedness of these impacts and illustrates the complex threats that pesticide drift poses to biodiversity across multiple ecosystems,” the researchers state. They continue: “Impacts include reduced reproductive rates, changes in growth, development, and/or behavior, modification of diversity or community organization, disruption of food webs, and declines of important species. Pesticides disrupt the delicate balance between species that define a functioning ecosystem. Impacts can be local, transnational, or even continental.”

Pesticide drift threatens beneficial species and subsequently the entire agricultural system. The process of pesticide drift, “in which up to 25% of applied pesticides are carried by air currents, can transport chemicals over hundreds or even thousands of kilometers,” the authors state. Other research has found that less than .1% of pesticides applied to crops reach the target pest. Drift rates vary due to a series of factors including temperature, wind speed, humidity, and soil type.

“The overuse of synthetic pesticides has unintentionally contaminated unintended areas, harmed non-target species and disrupted ecosystems that support agricultural productivity,” the researchers note. Pesticide drift “exposes a wide range of nontarget living organisms such as beneficial insects, birds, and other animals that live near to/or far from the incurred areas.” Drift exposure upsets the intricate balance of the ecosystem and reduces the ability of beneficial species to support agriculture. This underlines the broader environmental impacts that must be “carefully managed to preserve the ecological equilibrium on which agriculture ultimately depends,” the authors highlight.

Biodiversity is essential for ecological stability and function, as well as to ensure food security. The current biodiversity crisis, however, is perpetuated by the use of pesticides in agriculture. “Evidence shows that pesticides are driving severe biodiversity declines, often acting in concert with additional stressors,” the researchers postulate. They continue: “Herbicides, particularly glyphosate, dicamba, and 2,4-D sprays, have caused significant damage to many non-target plant species… Milkweed, a plant essential to monarch butterflies, often suffers glyphosate drift from farm areas. The resulting decline in milkweed plants has been one of the contributing factors to declining monarch populations since this plant helps in the growth and development of caterpillar stages of life during its life cycle.” (See more on monarch butterfly declines here and how to help protect this species here.)

Pesticide drift greatly impacts insect diversity, contributing to the “insect apocalypse” that not only affects primary producers and pollinators but a wide range of other species throughout the food web. As the authors share: “Some field studies have observed that, as plant diversity declines due to herbicide drift, so does the diversity of herbivores and predators and results in less balanced and more often pest-prone ecosystems. Thus, even though herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides target different organisms, their combined effects across multiple trophic levels can result in overall ecosystem destabilization.”

Microorganisms within the soil are essential to many ecosystem functions, such as nutrient cycling, decomposition, and overall soil health. When soil biota are exposed to pesticides, particularly through spray drift and runoff, entire ecosystems can be threatened. “Spray drift is a primary pathway through which environmental microbes encounter pesticides,” the researchers say. “The effects of pesticides on microbial communities and their diversity include biomass reduction, growth disturbance, shifts in microbial community structure, and respiratory problems.”

Pesticide drift is also of great concern for bodies of water and the aquatic species within them. One study in California reveals that pesticide drift has polluted more than 10% of streams in several regions. (See more on the effects of pesticides on aquatic organisms here and here.)

The widespread occurrence of pesticide drift is of global concern. “Detectable levels of pesticides in pristine regions, such as remote parts of Brazil, illustrate how atmospheric transport can disseminate the chemicals long distances from their original site of application and therefore contaminate regions with little or no direct use of pesticides,” the authors state. Detected pesticides in these areas include herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides. This diversity underlines the complex mixture of chemicals present in the atmosphere throughout various regions.

Current risk assessments, particularly through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), fail to address the impacts of pesticides on ecosystem functions and biodiversity, especially concerning pesticide drift for nontarget organisms. The authors share: “Pesticide regulation is based, to a great extent, on the paradigm of ‘presumed safe until proven hazardous.’ That is, pesticides are generally approved for marketing based on available determinations of safety and only subsequently restricted or removed from the marketplace when evidence develops to show that they present significant risks. EPA, for instance, is mostly very reluctant to ban or put any limits on pesticides until substantial evidence of the damage caused can be presented.” (See more on EPA failures to protect the environment and public health here, here, here, here, here, and here.) The agency has ignored studies going back decades in making exposure calculations in the registration of pesticides, whether it is direct pesticide drift or pesticides carried in fog.

“New research has shown that even when new evidence showed a risk in its use, including crop damage and health effects, the EPA has allowed the continued use of pesticides known for their environmental and health hazards, such as dicamba,” the researchers note. “Regulations must be able to better protect ecosystems and human health by requiring consideration of long-term effects before the wide acceptance of pesticides.”

Not only would more accurate risk assessments more fully characterize the cumulative impacts of pesticide drift for all potentially impacted species, but holistic solutions, if implemented, would better protect health and the environment. As the authors state, “[O]rganic agriculture completely prohibits the use of pesticides, it can be considered one solution to reducing the problems of pesticide drift.” To preserve biodiversity for future generations and to support agricultural systems that we depend on for food security, organic land management is an available, economically viable, and profitable option, which is also climate-friendly.

Organic as a solution ensures that soil health is prioritized and that the health of all organisms is protected. Learn more about the benefits of organic agriculture here and here, and take action to have your voice heard on governmental actions that are harmful to the environment and public and worker health, increase overall pesticide use, or undermine the advancement of organic, sustainable, and regenerative practices and policies.

Sign up here to receive our Action of the Week and Weekly News Updates delivered right to your inbox and stay informed with the Daily News Blog!

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Source:

Albaseer, S. et al. (2024) Beyond the field: How pesticide drift endangers biodiversity, Environmental Pollution. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749124022437.

(Beyond Pesticides, January 2, 2025) Adding to the body of scientific literature on the fast escalating antibiotic resistance crisis is a study published by Chinese scientists in Environmental Science & Technology, which shows that antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in soils move up through trophic levels via predation. Gut microbiomes of soil fauna have been found to be reservoirs of ARGs. How this process operates in soils is vital, because what happens in soil microbes does not stay there. If bacteria altered in soils move up trophic levels, ARGs may strengthen the multicellular agricultural pests the industry is trying to kill—insects, fungi, plants—not to mention bringing their libraries of resistant genes into the microbiomes of vertebrates, including humans.

Antibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon, but human activity has greatly increased its presence in ecosystems the world over, including in one of the ecological niches of greatest concern to the future of food and human health: soils. Soils are complexes of mineral and organic substrates populated by billions of microorganisms and tiny animals. They are rapidly being degraded by conventional agriculture, forestry, and land management practices generally—more than a third of the world’s agricultural land has already been severely damaged by pesticides, fertilizers, water depletion, and loss of biodiversity.

As Beyond Pesticides reported last May, pesticides alter the microbial species composition in agricultural soils. A Russian study found microbial taxa known for high antibiotic resistance in fields treated with pesticides. Other research covered by Beyond Pesticides has demonstrated that the resistance develops in the fields. Bacteria have numerous ways of defending themselves that can apply to both pesticides and antibiotics. For example, microbes like Salmonella and E. coli react to glyphosate, dicamba and 2,4-D with a non-specific defense mechanism that enhances their resistance to antibiotics. In fact, antibiotics may be viewed simply as pesticides aimed at microbes rather than fungi, insects, weeds or other pests.

An enormous amount of DNA is available to microbes in their environments, and genes have multiple ways to migrate from one organism to another, either in single-gene units or through mobile genetic elements that provide both genes and the adjunct equipment to function inside a cell. The packet of genes in a bacterium that confers antibiotic resistance is known as the resistome. But little is known about how genes may move through trophic levels from primary producers like bacteria and algae to higher predators.

The current study used a “model food chain” common in soils and frequently used in ecotoxicity studies consisting of Folsomia candida, a very small insect popularly called a springtail, and one of its most common predators, the mite Hypoaspis aculeifer.

The researchers exposed a group of springtails to zinc thiazole, an antibacterial and antifungal chemical, and included a control group of springtails with no exposure. Zinc thiazole has been used in China since the early 2010s, especially against rice pathogens. It is a wide-spectrum treatment and is considered to be of low toxicity, but recently evidence has emerged that it disrupts the thyroid gland. It does not appear to be registered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for use in the U.S.

The researchers allowed one group of mites to prey on zinc-thiazole-exposed springtails and another group of mites to prey on unexposed springtails. No mites were directly exposed to the pesticide. Thus, they had two trophic webs, one with pesticide exposure and one without. The researchers then analyzed the gut microbiota of all groups to see if ARGs in the springtails transferred to the mites. They did.

The balance among various microbial species was altered both in the treated springtails versus their control group, and in the mites that ate pesticide-treated springtails compared to the control mites. The mites that preyed on the exposed springtails had different ARGS than those of the control mites, and the treated springtails and their predators shared more ARGs than control springtails and their predators did. This indicated that transfer to the mites from the treated springtails had occurred, showing that pesticide-induced antibiotic resistance can travel not simply among microbes at the same trophic level but up levels via predation.

“The altered and expanded resistomes [resistant genes] of predators suggest that the transmission of ARGs through the soil food chain contributes to resistance spread to higher trophic levels, and our research indicates that this process is amplified under pesticide pressure,” the authors write. “Thus, resistomes may further transfer into higher trophic levels in the food web along with predation and may spread to diverse ecosystems accompanied by invertebrate behavior or activities.”

Antibiotic resistance is a natural feature of the biosphere because life forms have been attacking and surviving attacks for billions of years. Resistance is transparently Darwinian, whether the struggle has evolved naturally or through human activity—something the pesticide industry has willfully failed to accept since its inception. The pesticide industry’s business model markets toxic substances it knows will generate organism resistance to its chemical and then develop another often more toxic substance, or cocktail of substances, to attack the resistant organism—creating what has been called the pesticide treadmill.

Bacteria are ubiquitous; everything more complex than a microbe has a microbiome, and the current study shows that genes can easily microbiome-hop. The transfer of various resistance mechanisms through microbiomes at different trophic levels is one more consequence of conventional agriculture’s perverse attachment to a delusional idea.

The study result has obvious implications for pesticide usage, because resistance to such chemicals is likely spreading from the lower trophic webs into the microbiomes of organisms like moths and beetles and fungi that attack food crops. Pesticides and antibiotics are altering the structure of entire ecosystems. Their use creates a feedback loop of disaster. It is clear by now that the harmful microbes, like the larger agricultural pests, cannot be completely controlled by pesticides and antibiotics, and the attempt is doing more harm than good over the long term. The insistence that industrial practices can dominate one of the most fundamental of the processes that have created the biosphere—natural selection—is a flawed and dangerous assumption that must change without delay, according to healthy ecosystem advocates.

Organic agriculture supports the biodiversity of soils and preserves the qualities that make them fertile in the first place. See Beyond Pesticides’ 2023 report, Pesticides and You – Beyond Pesticides: Protecting Health and the Environment with Science, Policy, and Action, for a roadmap to transformative change supported by reliable scientific evidence.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Sources:

Increased Transmission of Antibiotic Resistance Occurs in a Soil Food Chain under Pesticide Stress
Liu et al.
Ecotoxicology and Public Health December 8, 2024
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/epdf/10.1021/acs.est.4c07822?ref=article_openPDF

Thyroid-disrupting effects and mechanism of thiazole-Zn-induced thyroid cell hypertrophy and hyperplasia in male Sprague-Dawley rats
Honglian et al.
Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety
Volume 196, 15 June 2020
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0147651320303833

FDA Cites Resistance to Medically Important Antimicrobials as Critical Health Issue
Beyond Pesticides, January 11, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/01/fda-cites-antimicrobial-resistance-as-critical-health-issue/

Glyphosate Induces Antibiotic Resistance in Deadly Hospital-Acquired Infection
Beyond Pesticides, November 8, 2022
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2022/11/glyphosate-induces-antibiotic-resistance-in-deadly-hospital-acquired-infection/

Antibiotic-Resistance Genes Rise with Pesticide Application, as Study Adds to a Plethora of Findings
Beyond Pesticides, May 29, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/05/antibiotic-resistance-genes-rise-with-pesticide-application-as-study-adds-to-a-plethora-of-findings/

Widely Used Insecticide Imidacloprid Negatively Impacts Soil Communities, Study Finds
Beyond Pesticides, December 10, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/category/biodiversity/soil-microbiome/

Pesticides and You Beyond Pesticides: Protecting Health and the Environment with Science, Policy, and Action
Volume 42, Numbers 1–4 & Volume 43, Number 1, 2023
https://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/BP-TransformativeChange.2022.23.pdf

(Beyond Pesticides, December 24, 2024 – January 1, 2025) We wish you a healthy and happy holiday season! The health and environmental challenges that we face as families and communities across the nation and worldwide require us to stay engaged. The stark reality of the challenges ahead energizes us at Beyond Pesticides to strengthen our program—now, more than ever!  

And, we trust that you, like us, want to push forward for a livable future. In this context, please see our annual report and summary on the important work that we are doing, and please consider a contribution to Beyond Pesticides during this holiday season. 

While the threats of health, biodiversity, and climate crises grow exponentially, the solutions we have advocated for decades are now within reach. We know how to produce food and manage land without petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, as organic food is widely available. Beautiful parks, playing fields, and schoolyards do not require toxic chemical use. At the same time, the regulatory system underperforms, as existential health and environmental problems escalate.  

And, we know that individual steps that we take to stay healthy, as important as they are, cannot protect us and the natural world, on which we depend, from involuntary petrochemical exposure through ongoing contamination of land, air, and water. The science is telling us that we can no longer tinker with chemical reduction strategies that fall short of protecting our health, biodiversity, and climate. 

Your support enables us to move forward with our bold program. 

A strategy for curtailing threats to health, biodiversity, and health 
Beyond Pesticides shares the vision of people and communities that are striving to ensure a future that protects health and sustains life. We are facing existential crises—the climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, and severe public health threats—from cancer to neurological, reproductive, and endocrine system effects, including brain and behavioral impacts. To reverse these threats —which we can do— we advance model organic solutions that eliminate billions of pounds of fossil fuel-based pesticides and synthetic fertilizers and nurture biological systems that take dangerous pollutants out of our environment, protecting health and the ecosystems that sustain life.    

To meet the existential health, biodiversity, and climate crises, we provide real-time support to people and organizations, from local to global, with up-to-date scientific findings, policy critiques, and timely initiatives, empowering strategic action with knowledge on:  

• The current and looming threats to human health and ecosystems and the dire consequences of inaction or measures that fall far short of what is necessary; and 

• The path forward to eliminate the use of petrochemical-based pesticides and fertilizers, including the constellation of toxic materials used in food production and the management of homes, gardens, parks, playing fields, and schools.  

Over this past year, the urgency of our work has never been more palpable. Our daily collaboration with communities across the country—via the Parks for a Sustainable Future program—to adopt organic land management policies and practices in public spaces (parks, playing fields, and schoolyards) defined the path forward as a model to eliminate toxic pesticides and fertilizers, protect children, pets, and families, and sustain local ecosystems.  

Our programs bridge policy and practice—reframing strategies that go after an endless list of toxic chemicals—and advancing a holistic approach that recognizes complex biological communities, the importance of soil microbiota, and ecosystem services in the context of broader human health and environmental protection. By developing organic systems plans and training parks and public works departments on organic-compatible practices and products, we engage in a systems approach that works with soil biology, enriches nutrient cycling, and cultivates more resilient landscapes that meet community expectations while delivering long-term cost savings.  

It is imperative that, as we focus national attention on meaningful systemic change, we simultaneously address the disproportionate risk to people of color communities and workers, from landscapers to farmworkers. Disproportionate harm to people of color from toxic petrochemicals is a continuing crisis and can only be solved when we transition away from dependency on them and use stops. The manufacture of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides also creates a major environmental injustice for predominantly Black and Brown communities where production facilities are often located. 

We start with the science—calling for the urgent need to act  

With science made accessible to nonscientists, we empower people to advocate effectively with decision makers, elected officials, and all those responsible for directing or managing the choice of practices and products. Our Daily News, published on our website, focuses on the compelling scientific justification for eliminating pesticides. Our journal, Pesticides and You, provides a compendium of scientific research as a breathtaking warning from the science community that our laws are not adequately protective and the shift to organic is urgently needed. Our recent issue, Meeting the Existential Challenges: Empowering Action for Change with Science, shows the preponderance of science. 

With our daily monitoring, we maintain robust scientific databases that offer tools to empower local activists and more to take action in their communities, schools, workplaces, and homes as “tools for change”—including our Gateway on Pesticide Hazards and Safe Pest Management, Eating with a Conscience (on ecological and worker effects), What the Science Shows (pollinators), Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database, and ManageSafe™ (how to manage homes and gardens without pesticides). 

Elevating our voice and networking for change—taking a stand! 

In the face of the chemical industry and related service providers wielding tremendous power across all levels of government, and agencies not keeping pace with the escalating environmental and public health challenges, it is the communities and their elected officials that have chosen to actively engage in democratic decision making to protect the health of their residents. 

We advance systemic change, advocating policies and practices to change the underlying conditions associated with land management that contribute to the existential public health, biodiversity, or climate crises. In this context, we issue an Action of the Week throughout the year that targets opportunities to integrate this thinking into the public policy debate at the local, state, national, and international level. While we comment on specific chemicals and actions before regulatory agencies, we characterize them as poster children for what is wrong with toxic pesticide and fertilizer dependency. In these actions, we point to the unreasonableness of the harm that is being allowed by policy and regulatory decisions, given the availability of organic alternatives.   

Having worked with organic systems since our founding in 1981, we also know that this change can be achieved. We continue—through campaigns such as Keeping Organic Strong—to push for the growth of organic agriculture as the only acceptable and foundational form of land management for the future.     

Our work is multidimensional and collaborative— building on our organizational history!  

When Beyond Pesticides was founded in 1981, we knew that we needed to forge a new path that rejected the reliance on petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, while the laws protected the chemical industry more than people, workers, and environment. With stronger government and chemical and allied industry alliances on the horizon, our community-based campaigns to transition to organic land management are critically important.  

We call out compromises that are unacceptable, given the existential crises. Several weeks ago, EPA announced that it would allow the continued use of the highly neurotoxic insecticide chlorpyrifos on crops that are among the most extensively grown and used in the world—soybeans, wheat, cotton, citrus, sugar beets, and numerous fruits and vegetables. EPA described the canceled uses as a victory. However, here is our response to the media: The compromises associated with petrochemical use and the public’s health are unconscionable given the availability of cost-effective and productive alternatives. . . With decisions like this in the aggregate, the toxic load on people and the environment is unsustainable.   

Forging a Path Toward a Livable Future, Together! 

Despite the challenges, we draw optimism from our community-based work, showing the path forward. We ask you to support us in expanding our grassroots work and voice, which speaks through our hands-on experience to build a sustainable future that eliminates the use of toxic pesticides and fertilizers. When the chemical industry and its allies in elective office seek to undermine public health and environmental protection, we push back with the same empowered grassroots network, calling out unacceptable harm, given the viability of the organic alternative for the common good. 

Our team at Beyond Pesticides looks forward to continuing to partner with you in the new year to meet the existential environmental and public health challenges with truly organic solutions through policy, science, and action—one day at a time for ourselves and for future generations! 

For more information and to discover actions that have defended democratic decision making to adopt organic land management on public land, informed action, and meet the challenges of 2025, please click on the image above or the link to access the Year in Review page for 2024. 

It’s a fact. Your support makes our work possible. 

A special thank you to all our donors and supporters this year. Without your engagement and incredible generosity, it would not be possible to lead the transition to a world free of toxic pesticides. Our team provides up-to-date information about the health and environmental hazards of pesticides, pesticide regulation and policy, holistic nontoxic management systems, and cutting-edge science—free of charge to the public. This program is not possible without the generosity of people like you!   

Thank you for considering support for Beyond Pesticides this year! Please mail your tax-deductible donation to our office or donate securely on our website! 

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

(Beyond Pesticides, December 23, 2024) As the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) proposes to list the Monarch butterfly as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, a look at the factors contributing to the butterfly’s catastrophic decline includes a stunning failure of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulation of pesticides to protect biodiversity and the ecosystems necessary to its survival. While there are many factors affecting the survival of Monarchs, EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) has allowed pesticide use to continue unabated, with only rhetorical attention to the problem. Meanwhile, the science shows a range of pesticide effects associated with insecticides and herbicides. A study published in PLOS One in June identifies insecticides as the primary driver in butterfly’s decline, as EPA points, almost exclusively to herbicide use and the destruction of Monarchs’ food source, milkweed habitat. While two or several factors can be true at the same time, EPA has failed to consider the confluence of factors, including the impacts of climate, as rising temperatures are exacerbated by the production and use of petrochemical pesticides.

FWS is stepping in at a critical time with looming biodiversity collapse and in the absence of EPA taking the reins to eliminate pesticides that are threatening the existence of Monarchs. Populations of both Eastern and Western monarch butterflies have been decreasing in recent years, leading environmentalists to clamor for an “endangered” classification for the species. Declining monarch populations are symptomatic of the ongoing insect apocalypse, which threatens worldwide ecology and agriculture—and exemplifies the failure of the EPA, including OPP, to regulate with a holistic lens that protects biodiversity.  

EPA’s narrative on Monarchs is symptomatic of a program that is focused on some factors in isolation of the full range of critical elements associated with all the pesticides it registers in combination. In addition, rather than leading with its mandate to focus on pesticides in the protection of Monarchs, the agency appears to be deflecting on the issue by posting on its website issues other than pesticides that are affecting Monarchs’ survival.

On its Monarch page, OPP highlights “loss of breeding habitat, loss of overwintering habitat in Mexico (where the butterflies spend their winters), changes in weather patterns (including winter storms), and other factors.” The agency Incudes reference to an article that, while mentioning pesticides, stresses migratory challenges as the cause of decline. Then, the agency continues with a focus on herbicides as the problem, stating the following: “EPA believes that a holistic approach is needed for monarch conservation that includes judicious use of herbicides, balancing weed management needs with monarch conservation needs, and focusing on ways to support monarch conservation through pesticide registration review, registration and stakeholder outreach and education.” The webpage then links to a 2015 risk management document that further focuses on herbicides to the exclusion of insecticides and other pesticides. On its Action to Protect Pollinators page, EPA refers back to its 2015 document and is locked into the assumption that, despite the harm it causes, there must be continued reliance on genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant crops that are dependent on widespread herbicide use as well as other production and land management practices that rely on herbicides. The agency does not consider organic management systems in its analysis, despite its commercial and cost-effective efficacy and productivity in the market.

Although many factors are involved in the devastation of insect populations, scientific studies show that pesticide use ranks high, led by the use of seeds coated with neonicotinoid insecticides. Other pesticide impacts include mortality from insecticide drift and the destruction of milkweed by herbicides. These impacts are exacerbated by climate change, which is made worse by the production and use of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers. 

Monarch butterflies serve as an indicator of the status of insect pollinators and their habitats. Because so many people have been involved in monitoring their populations, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has responded to the call to protect them by proposing to list monarchs as a threatened species and designate critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Plants or animals can be listed as either “threatened” or “endangered.” When a species is listed, it can help provide resources and even legal action to protect them. FWS explains the terms: an endangered species is a plant or animal species “that is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range,” and a threatened species is one “that is likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” 

In 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classified the monarch butterfly as endangered and updated the classification to vulnerable a year later. Although the IUCN listing has no legal weight in the United States, it calls attention to the plight of the butterfly, which according to IUCN 2022 estimates, showed that the eastern population of migratory monarchs declined by as much as 84 percent between 1996 and 2014 and the western migratory monarch’s population dropped from around 10 million insects in the 1980s to 1,914 in 2021—a loss of about 99.9 percent.

The proposed listing will provide increased federal protection and resources for monarch conservation, in the form of protection from harm, a comprehensive recovery plan, and ongoing funding to restore their habitat. ESA prohibits the “take” of a single individual of a listed species. “Take” is defined in ESA as “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect or attempt to engage in any such conduct.” The likely “take,” which includes unintentional harm or death, of even one individual of a listed species, is enough to constitute a “may affect” determination under EPA’s policy and trigger the need for formal consultation with FWS. Hence, the proposed designation has the potential to prohibit pesticide use that harms not only monarchs but other pollinators as well. 

Tell the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to finalize its proposed listing of monarchs as threatened.

Comment to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
I am very concerned about the impact of pesticide use on biodiversity—particularly in promoting the “insect apocalypse.” Populations of both Eastern and Western monarch butterflies have been decreasing in recent years, leading many to want an “endangered” classification for the species. Declining monarch populations are symptomatic of the ongoing insect apocalypse, which threatens worldwide ecology and agriculture. Although many factors are involved in the devastation of insect populations, scientific studies show that pesticide use ranks high, led by seeds coated with neonicotinoid insecticides. Other pesticide impacts include mortality from insecticide drift and the destruction of milkweed by herbicides. These impacts are exacerbated by climate change.

Monarch butterflies serve as an indicator of the status of insect pollinators and their habitats. I am happy to see the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) propose to protect them by listing monarchs as a threatened species and designating critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Plants or animals can be listed as either “threatened” or “endangered”. FWS explains the terms: an endangered species is a plant or animal species “that is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range,” and a threatened species is one “that is likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” While it can be argued that monarchs should be listed as endangered, either listing will provide needed protection.

In 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classified the monarch butterfly as endangered and updated the classification to vulnerable a year later. Although the IUCN listing has no legal weight in the United States, it calls attention to the plight of the butterfly, which according to IUCN 2022 estimates, showed that the eastern population of migratory monarchs declined by as much as 84 percent between 1996 and 2014 and the western migratory monarch’s population dropped from around 10 million insects in the 1980s to 1,914 in 2021—a loss of about 99.9 percent.

FWS’s proposed listing will provide increased federal protection and resources for monarch conservation, in the form of protection from harm and a comprehensive recovery plan and ongoing funding to restore their habitat. ESA prohibits the “take” of a single individual of a listed species. “Take” is defined in ESA as “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect or attempt to engage in any such conduct.” The likely “take,” which includes unintentional harm or death, of even one individual of a listed species, is enough to constitute a “may affect” determination under EPA’s policy and trigger the need for formal consultation with FWS. Hence, the proposed designation has the potential to prohibit pesticide use that harms not only monarchs but other pollinators as well.

Please finalize the listing of monarch butterflies as threatened.

Thank you.

Image: Art Page submission from Carol Moyer, “Monarch Butterfly Sideways with Closed Wings.“

(Beyond Pesticides, December 20, 2024) On December 12, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) opened a public comment period on its proposal to list the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) as a threatened species and to designate critical habitats for the species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Under the proposal, the designated habitats would span approximately 4,395 acres throughout overwintering sites in coastal California. The public comment period will be open until March 12, 2025. These suggested protections call attention to the role of chemical-intensive agriculture in affecting populations of pollinators and other beneficial organisms.

George Kimbrell, legal director at the Center for Food Safety, shares in a press release that the “monarch listing decision is a landmark victory 10 years in the making. It is also a damning precedent, revealing the driving role of pesticides and industrial agriculture in the ongoing extinction crisis… But the job isn’t done: Monarchs still face an onslaught of pesticides. The Service must do what science and the law require and promptly finalize protection for monarchs.”

In the docket, FWS states, “Under the Act, a species warrants listing if it meets the definition of an endangered species (in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range) or a threatened species (likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range). If we determine that a species warrants listing, we must list the species promptly and designate the species’ critical habitat to the maximum extent prudent and determinable.”

FWS continues, “We have determined that the monarch butterfly meets the Act’s definition of a threatened species; therefore, we are proposing to list it as such and proposing a designation of its critical habitat… We have determined that the monarch butterfly meets the definition of a threatened species due to the following threats: the ongoing impacts from loss and degradation of breeding, migratory, and overwintering habitat (from past conversion of grasslands and shrublands to agriculture and widespread use of herbicides; logging/thinning at overwintering sites in Mexico; urban development, senescence ( i.e., deterioration with age), and incompatible management of overwintering sites in California; and drought); exposure to insecticides; and effects of climate change.”

FWS plans to improve monarch populations include the need to “(1) achieve a significant increase in the availability of milkweed and nectar plants in monarch breeding and migratory areas; (2) protect and enhance overwintering habitat; (3) avoid and minimize impacts to monarchs and their habitat from insecticides and herbicides; and (4) maintain public support for the conservation of monarch butterflies.”

Additional regulatory conservation efforts were proposed in July of 2024 when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its Draft Insecticide Strategy, which proposes a framework meant to identify which agricultural uses of conventional insecticides impact listed species and how to determine mitigation measures for those insecticides. (See Beyond Pesticides’ comments here.) This strategy will be finalized by March 31, 2025, according to EPA, and will be applied to new insecticide registrations and for existing insecticide reevaluations. Other initiatives through EPA and FWS include the Vulnerable Species Action Plan, which identifies mitigation measures for listed species particularly vulnerable to pesticides, but despite these efforts, the U.S. often fails to take meaningful action. (See more here.)

According to an article in USA Today; “The final decision will be in the hands of the incoming Trump Administration. In 2020, during the first Trump administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service found that monarchs were threatened with extinction but did not list them because other species were more high-priority.” (See previous coverage here, here, and here) This new opportunity to add monarch butterflies to the threatened list, and to designate critical habitats for them, would be responsive to scientists and advocates who have long noted the devastating population declines.

According to FWS, the eastern migratory population of monarch butterflies is the largest and overwinters in the mountains of central Mexico, while the western migratory population primarily overwinters in California. According to the Service’s most recent species status assessment: “Today, the eastern migratory population is estimated to have declined by approximately 80%. The western migratory population has declined by more than 95% since the 1980s, putting the western populations at greater than 99% chance of extinction by 2080. During this same period, the probability of extinction for eastern monarchs ranges from 56 to 74%.”

As was reported in The Washington Post, finalizing the proposed rule would allow the monarch butterflies to “become one of the most widespread species ever protected under the 1973 law.” The Post continues: “The monarch is just one of the most visible species at risk of disappearing as an estimated 1 million plants and animals are threatened with extinction due to rising temperatures, shrinking habitat and other human-driven threats. The loss of pollinators such as butterflies could have profound effects on ecosystems and people who depend on them.”

Beyond Pesticides previously reported that the biodiversity crisis is one of multiple crises that are compounding one another. While human actions are contributing to an ongoing Holocene or sixth mass extinction, the globe is also facing crises in human disease and climate change. The Endangered Species Act focuses on the species and habitats most at risk of extinction. However, the statement of purpose also recognizes the importance of conserving the ecosystem on which they depend.

Preserving biodiversity is imperative for all life and starts by considering all the factors that contribute to the crisis in the first place. Pesticide use is a major cause of declining biodiversity, which is manifested in extinctions, endangered species, and species vulnerable to environmental disturbances—including climate change, habitat fragmentation, and toxic chemicals. (See previous coverage over the last 10+ years on how these threats impact monarch butterflies here, here, here, here, here, and here.)  

As reported by The New Lede: “Most pesticides registered for use in the US have not been rigorously tested for their impacts on insects other than honeybees, a single non-native species. Scientists and conservationists have argued for years that this system fails to protect pollinators and underestimates the toll of pesticides on these animals, which is especially relevant given the decline of many insect species worldwide.” (See Beyond Pesticides’ previous coverage on regulatory deficiencies for pollinators here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

To address these deficiencies, Earthjustice, on behalf of the Xerces Society, has petitioned EPA to require pesticide manufacturers to submit data that assesses impacts on more diverse insect pollinator species than just honeybees. In a recent article, Earthjustice shares: “We cannot ignore the risk of pesticides to the monarch and other native pollinator species. The decline of these invertebrate pollinators threatens all of us. To begin, human food systems, made possible by insect pollinators, are in trouble.”

Protecting monarch butterflies is a necessary decision rooted in science. These pollinators play a critical role in the ecosystem, and their extinction would have cascading negative impacts. As Tierra Curry, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity says in a press release: “The fact that a butterfly as widespread and beloved as the monarch is now the face of the extinction crisis is a tri-national distress signal warning us to take better care of the environment that we all share… What’s bad for monarchs is bad for humans, so we have to stop pretending that our health is somehow separate from that of the wildlife our activities are decimating.”

Within their press release, FWS’s director, Martha Williams, says: “The iconic monarch butterfly is cherished across North America, captivating children and adults throughout its fascinating lifecycle. Despite its fragility, it is remarkably resilient, like many things in nature when we just give them a chance… Science shows that the monarch needs that chance, and this proposed listing invites and builds on unprecedented public participation in shaping monarch conservation efforts. Providing monarchs with enough milkweed and nectar plants, even in small areas, can help put them on the road to recovery. Working together, we can help make this extraordinary species a legacy for our children and generations to come.” (See previous coverage on milkweed contamination from chemical-intensive agriculture here, here, and here.)

The elimination of petrochemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers is the solution moving forward to help protect species, like the monarch butterfly, from population effects due to chemical exposure and climate change. In adopting organic land management practices, the harmful effects seen with conventional methods are mitigated and the health of the environment, including all organisms it supports, is prioritized.

The monarch as a species needs protection in the context of healthy biodiversity, which sustains life. Watch an eye-opening talk by internationally renowned researcher, professor, and author David Goulson, PhD, who in plain language draws together scientific research on the elements of nature, critical to the web of life that sustains the rich diversity needed for a healthy planet. See 2023 National Forum, Session 1.

Stay tuned for how you can take action to protect monarch butterflies through Beyond Pesticides’ Action of the Week and by submitting comments to FWS before the March 12 deadline.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Source:

Cervantes Jr., F. and Weise, E. (2024) Is the stunning monarch butterfly endangered? New proposal could change its status., USA Today. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/12/10/monarch-butterfly-threatened-endangered-species/76898149007/.

Clark, M. (2024) Fish and Wildlife Service Proposes Endangered Species Act Protection for Monarch Butterfly; Urges Increased Public Engagement to Help Save the Species, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Available at: https://www.fws.gov/press-release/2024-12/monarch-butterfly-proposed-endangered-species-act-protection.

Curry, T. and Kimbrell, G. (2024) Monarchs Proposed for Endangered Species Act Protection, Center for Biological Diversity. Available at: https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/monarchs-proposed-for-endangered-species-act-protection-2024-12-10/.

Fish and Wildlife Service (2024) Endangered and Threatened Species: Species Status with Section 4(d) Rule for Monarch Butterfly and Designation of Critical Habitat, Regulations.gov. Available at: https://www.regulations.gov/document/FWS-R3-ES-2024-0137-0001.

Grandoni, D. (2024) U.S. moves to add monarch butterfly to the Endangered Species List, The Washington Post. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/12/10/monarch-butterfly-endangered-species-list/.

Main, D. (2024) EPA must tighten pesticide rules to protect pollinators like bees and butterflies, petition argues, The New Lede. Available at: https://www.thenewlede.org/2024/12/epa-must-tighten-pesticide-rules-pollinators-petition/.

Morrison, S. and Malfi, R. (2024) The Monarch Has Been Proposed for the Endangered Species List. It Still Needs Better Protections From Pesticides., Earthjustice. Available at: https://earthjustice.org/experts/sharmeen-morrison/the-monarch-has-been-proposed-for-the-endangered-species-list-it-still-needs-better-protections-from-pesticides.

(Beyond Pesticides, December 19, 2024) As The New York Times reported last month, the government in South Africa declared a national emergency—23 children died and nearly 900 people were sickened from pesticide poisoning in Johannesburg’s Soweto township. The illnesses and fatalities have been traced to small amounts of highly neurotoxic pesticides, including the insecticides terbufos and aldicarb, found in local food items. These chemicals, described by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as “street pesticides,” are being increasingly used (legally and illegally) for pest infestations in the townships and informal settlements of South Africa’s poorest communities, where poverty and inadequate waste collection exacerbates the pest management challenges. Without formal electricity, running water, or municipal garbage collection, many residents rely on highly toxic pesticides for pest infestations in their homes and makeshift markets, resulting in food inadvertently being contaminated with pesticides. 

The announcement highlights the dangers of allowing these highly toxic agricultural chemicals to be used in farming, with tragic consequences for vulnerable communities when they are diverted for use in urban settings. This tragic situation also draws attention to the elevated threat that pesticides pose when stringent enforcement mechanisms are not in place to ensure compliance with pesticide restrictions, even with the recognition that restrictions themselves are not necessarily adequate to protect the public’s health. Despite government plans to regulate small, informal stores known as “spaza shops,” advocates argue that, in addition to addressing the vestiges of apartheid, systemic poverty, and inhumane living conditions in informal settlements, the South African government should ban toxic pesticides in agriculture to “get hazardous pesticides off the street.” [The government announced immediate plans to inspect all registered South African terbufos manufacturers to ensure that practices are in place to prevent the diversion of farm pesticides to nonagricultural markets. Regulations on the traceability, repackaging, disposal, and sale of pesticides, insecticides, and food products will be reviewed. Additionally, the Department of Agriculture “… is in the process of reviewing and updating all relevant legislation with respect to the regulation and authorisation of agricultural pesticides for use in South Africa.”] 

As reported, at least 23 children died as of the end of November, including six young children in an incident of eating contaminated snacks in Naledi, Soweto. South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases investigated this incident and attributed the deaths to traces of terbufos identified in a snack.  The organophosphate terbufos can be lethal if ingested, inhaled, or through contact with skin, and, as President Ramaphosa wrote the following in his November 15 address to the country: “Even as our investigations are ongoing, it is critical to understand that this is not a problem confined to spaza shops and other informal traders. The unregulated use of restricted pesticides in communities has become a growing problem, with devastating consequences… In many townships, another chemical, aldicarb, and an organophosphate known as Galephirimi, are commonly sold by street vendors and hawkers to control rat infestations. Aldicarb has been banned for use in South Africa since 2016.” However, public health advocates argue that the government’s position does not go far enough (see here, here, and here).  

In South Africa, tens of thousands of farmworkers are put at risk annually when they are exposed to highly toxic pesticides, including the carbamate insecticide aldicarb, often without proper personal protective equipment. In response, a partnership between Women on Farms Project and Oxfam (in South Africa and Germany) launched a “Double Standards Pesticides” campaign in 2019 to pressure the government of South Africa to ban 67 pesticides already banned in the European Union. As Beyond Pesticides has previously reported, the Women on Farms Project has organized protests in South Africa to demand an end to the indiscriminate importation and use of these insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides. More recently, over 150 farmworkers, primarily women, marched to the German Consulate-General to demand an end to the country’s exportation of pesticides that the country has determined are too dangerous for their own domestic use (see here and here). The South African protesters have called attention to what they describe as the hypocritical practices of European and U.S. agrochemical companies, which sell products in developing countries deemed unsafe for use in their own regions. Farmworkers have voiced their health concerns linked to petrochemical exposure, chanting, “We’re dying of asthma, we’re dying of cancer, we’re dying of heart attacks.”  

Despite these efforts, including the march to the German Consulate-General and another at the South African headquarters of Bayer—the German corporation responsible for producing and exporting these agrochemicals—there has yet to be any significant change to these harmful practices. Bayer’s updated website highlights products such as the fungicide Antracol 70 WP (Propineb) and insecticides Biscaya 240 OD (Thiacloprid), Confidor (Imidacloprid), and Gaucho (Imidacloprid)—all of which are banned in the European Union (EU) but remain available for purchase in South Africa. These chemicals, in addition to product mixtures containing the weed killer paraquat and terbufos, are commonly employed in the region. The blatant sales of EU-prohibited and U.S.-banned substances in the Global South underscores that the ratification of international agreements (most of which the U.S. has not ratified) can sometimes be more symbolic than impactful. Without a global regulatory framework to manage such pesticides’ transport, storage, and use, these practices foster international dependency on hazardous chemicals in agriculture.  

Beyond Pesticides, in alignment with public health and environmental advocates, argues that the regulation of petrochemical pesticides, even a global framework, will not provide a solution that addresses the enormous scope of the harm pesticides cause. The sale of pesticides deemed so hazardous they are banned in wealthier, predominantly Western countries represents a double standard that reflects a “lower value on lives and ecosystems in poorer nations.”  

Many of the systemic injustices observed in South Africa parallel the challenges faced in the U.S. agricultural sector, like in California’s Central Valley and Florida’s citrus groves, where farmworkers face some of the lowest wages and harshest conditions, including exposure to toxic pesticides (see examples here, here, and here, including aldicarb use in citrus crops). These practices perpetuate environmental racism in agricultural work, with pesticide exposure, drift, and tainted water supplies compounding health risks for farmworkers and those residing in farming-intensive regions.  

For more information on environmental racism in South Africa, see the talk of Marcos Orellana, PhD (See 2023 Forum, session 2), the United Nations Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights. Dr. Orellana, an expert in international law and the law on human rights and the environment, issued UN reports in South Africa and Australia, capturing the significance of his work for environmental justice. Dr. Orellana teaches at the American University Washington College of Law. Dr. Orellana said, “The term ‘environmental racism’ describes institutionalized discrimination based on race or colour. In pre-1994 South Africa, the distribution of environmental risks and harms disproportionately and often deliberately targeted low-income groups and along racial lines. Today, despite the efforts by Government in setting up institutions and laws to address this legacy of environmental racism, pervasive air, water, and chemical pollution still imposes a heavy toll, especially on disadvantaged communities. Overcoming it will require significant additional efforts, including structural, legislative, economic, and environmental changes.”  

Pesticide exports from U.S. manufacturers also contribute to the dangerous global impact of these toxic chemicals. As Beyond Pesticides reported, a 2024 Brookings study by Nathan Donley, PhD, and Robert Bullard, PhD found that between 2015 and 2019, the U.S. exported unapproved pesticides containing neurotoxic organophosphates and carbamates to 42 nations. Notably, 81% of these recipient countries were low-to-middle-income nations, and 78% were estimated to experience pesticide poisoning among more than 30% of their agricultural workforce each year. The 2015 documentary Circle of Poison—featuring Beyond Pesticides’ executive director Jay Feldman and luminaries including Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, and President Jimmy Carter—also focuses on the toxic pesticide export issue. It documents the power of the global pesticide industry in shaping regulations (or lack thereof) and the dependency on petrochemical pesticides in food and farming around the world. 

[The need to halt such exports stems from the concept of the “circle of poison,” where banned pesticides are exported, used abroad, and returned as residues on imported foods, contaminating domestic food supplies. These practices perpetuate environmental injustice, disproportionately affecting populations in developing nations and marginalized communities globally, including BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) populations in the U.S., who already face higher levels of pesticide exposure.]  

Banned pesticides, often referred to as “legacy chemicals,” continue to harm agricultural workers decades later. Substances like DDT, DBCP, and PFAS—long banned or restricted—still affect human health and ecosystems today. This is not merely a historical issue but an ongoing crisis, as new toxic chemicals are introduced, used, and exported, with their full impacts often emerging years later (see here and here). The seemingly intractable problem of toxic pesticide exports remains unabated as the vested economic interests in the petroleum and chemical industry keep their grip on the chemical-intensive agriculture pesticide treadmill.  

To address this challenge, Beyond Pesticides urgently calls for global collaboration to reframe the public debate and advocacy towards holistic systems change via support for organic land management. Global or national regulatory structures continue to fail to adequately protect human life and health, or the environment, and the price is too high to trust laws or enforcement can overcome industrial agriculture, pesticide and petrochemical industries, and their profit motive. A holistic solution that eliminates reliance on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides exists and U.S. organic certification and underlying principles serve as a model for a global shift in agriculture that prioritizes soil health, biodiversity, and the elimination of toxic chemicals.  

The tragic and unnecessary deaths of twenty-three children in South Africa from pesticide exposure are a stark reminder of the urgent need for change. While it is too late to reverse the clock for those who have already suffered, decisive action can prevent future harm. American readers can call on legislators and regulatory agencies, particularly EPA, to end the export of pesticides banned or deregistered domestically. 

 Advocate for the elimination of hazardous chemicals by urging U.S. senators to ratify the Stockholm Convention and require EPA to classify persistent toxic petrochemical pesticides as unreasonable environmental risks as aligned with the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). Visit Beyond Pesticides’ Agricultural Justice webpage to learn more!  

As 2024 draws to a close, our team welcomes you to raise your voice and join us in forging a path to a livable future! For more information on Beyond Pesticides’ programs, please the newly-released Annual Report featured on our website! 

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.  

Feature image: View from Kliptown Youth Program Centre in Kliptown, Soweto, South Africa. Secondary image: Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photos by Beyond Pesticides’ Community Policy and Action Manager, Rika Gopinath.

Sources:   

In South Africa, Food Poisoning Kills at Least 23 Children, The New York Times, November 23, 2024 

Exported Toxicity: The EU’s Banned Pesticides in South Africa, Women on Farms Project, editor, solidar.org, February 2024 

Government’s toxic malaise causes poisonings, not spaza shops, The Mail & Guardian, November 7, 2024  

Bayer’s Use of EU-Forbidden Pesticides Ignites Protest in South Africa, Beyond Pesticides Daily News, September 19, 2023 

Child and adolescent mortality associated with pesticide toxicity in Cape Town, South Africa, 2010–2019: a retrospective case review, BMC Public Health, April 2023  

U.S. Exportation of Banned and Highly Restricted Pesticides Continues to Inflict Serious Harm Beyond Pesticides Daily News, August 5, 2022 

Where Do Pesticides Banned in Europe Go? Mostly to Poorer Countries, While Two-Thirds of Those Sent to Richer Countries Head for the U.S., Beyond Pesticides Daily News, September 25, 2020 

(Beyond Pesticides, December 18, 2024) A bombshell investigation conducted by Canada’s National Observer finds that Bayer, which acquired the Monsanto chemical company in 2018, colluded with environmental and public health regulators in Canada to obstruct a proposed neonicotinoid insecticide ban originally introduced in 2018. Advocates were stunned back in 2021 when Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA)—the Canadian counterpart to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—reversed its decision to phase out imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam by 2023.

The weaponization of scientific institutions and regulatory processes is commonplace in the U.S. context, with U.S. Right to Know publishing a report earlier this year on the corrupting impact of pesticide manufacturers at the Entomological Society of America 2023 annual meeting. (See Daily News here.) There are numerous Office of Inspector General (OIG) reports signaling EPA corruption and failures, including persisting industry influence in the cancer risk assessment process, inadequate leadership in addressing community harms of a former creosote-treated wood preservative plant turned Superfund site in Pensacola, Florida, and failure to protect the public from endocrine-disrupting chemicals, to name several examples.

In a recent press release, the David Suzuki Foundation, alongside numerous medical, legal, and civil society organizations, is calling on Health Canada to engage in an independent review to correct for agency corruption and industry influence.

The capitulation of regulatory agencies to industry-funded studies and science undermines public trust in environmental and public health institutions at a time when robust action is necessary to preserve public health, biodiversity, and climate resilience.

Weaponizing Science, Undermining Regulation

Christy Morrissey, PhD, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan specializing in various disciplines including avian ecotoxicology, was shocked by PMRA’s reversal, considering her research on pesticide drift in prairielands and wetlands was cited in Health Canada’s 2016 announcement and in the proposal to ban imidacloprid, the most widely used of the synthetic neonicotinoid insecticides. According to the report, “[T]he professor and freshwater ecologist shared unpublished water sampling data she had collected from wetlands in Saskatchewan farmland with the federal pesticide regulator. The data complemented her published studies on neonic contamination, which the PMRA also reviewed.” (See her published research here and here.)

Federal officials with the PMRA, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada shared Dr. Morrissey’s unpublished data with industry representatives, including Bayer officials. According to the investigative report, industry representatives and regulators met for hours through a “multi-stakeholder forum” just one month after the proposed ban was made public in November 2016 to discuss ways to prevent it from moving forward. Released meeting minutes depict a “collegial” tone that is “deferential to industry and aimed at preserving neonic use.” One official commented that it was not the government’s objective to “take away products from agriculture.”

To the dismay of Dr. Morrissey, federal officials at PMRA shared her unpublished data from 2014 with Bayer despite an understanding that the pesticide regulatory body would not share the data with industry unless “they signed an affidavit to use it as a part of the registration process.” Dr. Morrisey’s data was derived from a monitoring sampling of 115 wetlands for bird breeding. “In contrast, Bayer replicated her tests during the end of summer when fields were dry and neonics weren’t running into the water,” Canada’s National Observer reports. “Instead of visiting and taking water samples from the sites, they relied primarily on Google Earth and Street View to find the wetlands Morrissey sampled and evaluate if they were relevant to the PMRA’s pesticide risk assessment. Bayer’s team only visited ‘a few sites’ in person,” the report says. In reversing the proposed ban, PMRA adopted Bayer’s critique of “relevant” sites in Dr. Morrissey’s aquatic risk assessment in its final decision to allow the continued use of imidacloprid. The Agency then went on to draw from 27 industry-run studies of mesocosms (simulated outdoor environments), even though “Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, and European Union and Dutch pesticide regulators consider mesocosm studies too scientifically weak to set water quality guidelines for pesticides,” according to the report.

Industry Interference is the Status Quo

There is an extensive record of pesticide manufacturers’ (including Bayer) interference in regulatory and academic institutions to the detriment of public health and environmental stability.

The industry has advanced the idea that petrochemical-based products are integral to climate “solutions,” including carbon markets and regenerative agriculture. Bayer-Monsanto has faced public scrutiny across the globe for the harm that its products have caused to frontline communities and stewards. For example, in 2023 a collective of Mayan beekeepers (Colectivo de Comunidades Mayas) alleged that a mass die-off of more than 300,000 bees led to a financial loss of $633,000 US dollars (12 million pesos). Not to mention the proliferation of South Africa-based farmer protests in 2023, as toxic pesticides that are banned from use in the European Union continue to be imported into their markets.

In recent years, Bayer-Monsanto and Corteva have grown to become leading players in voluntary carbon markets based in the United States. Based on Civil Eats’ reporting, Bayer/Monsanto with Climate FieldView and Corteva chemical company (previously Dow chemical company and Dupont, known as DowDuPont) with its Carbon Solutions program, cite their pesticide products as tools for sustainable agricultural practices, bundling these toxic pesticides with sustainable practices like no-till/reduced-till agriculture and cover cropping that can be healthy components of organically managed systems. (See Daily News here and Civil Eats investigation here.)

In the context of regenerative agriculture, a study funded by CropLife America, the trade association for pesticide manufacturers, highlights Integrated Pest Management (IPM) as the ideal systems solution for improving soil health in vaguely defined “regenerative” agriculture, which it maintains necessitates the continuation of pesticide inputs. The study was written by four authors with varying levels of connections to the major agrichemical industry trade group, including academic researchers with funding from the pesticide lobbying group or direct employment. In the disclosure statement at the end of the article in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, the authors indicate that the work was supported by CropLife and then say, “No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).” (See Daily News here.) For more Daily News on greenwashing implications of regenerative agriculture, see here.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and EPA jointly released a report setting the stage for the expansion of genetically engineered crops and products that would further enrich corporations at the expense of long-term public health and ecosystem balance. (See Daily News analysis here.)

Courts have stepped in to act as a backstop to legislative and executive inaction. On July 10, 2024, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) does not preempt pesticide exposure victims’ state law claims against pesticide manufacturers, based on reporting from The New Lede. This decision builds on years of judicial precedent from the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) that protects individuals’ right to use failure-to-warn claims against producers of toxic pesticides. (See Daily News here.) However, the chemical industry has moved the battle to state legislatures and the U.S. Congressional debate on the federal Farm Bill, where it is seeking through state and federal law to be shielded from liability for its failure to warn pesticide users about hazards.

Call to Action

Beyond Pesticides, in coordination with communities across the country, has called for the separation of corporation and state given the outsized impacts that various actors in the petrochemical and pesticide sectors have wrought on biodiversity, public health, and climate resilience.

In a study published in Frontiers in Toxicology, which builds on EPA data reports, all five neonicotinoids evaluated—acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid, thiacloprid, and thiamethoxam—are associated with significant shrinkage of brain tissue at the highest dosage. Neonics have also been linked to breast cancer, and developmental issues in the brain and nervous system, among other human health effects. There are already ten U.S. states that have restricted or banned the use of neonicotinoid insecticide products and the European Union banned neonics on all outdoor areas, only permitting their use in enclosed greenhouses. (See Daily News here, here, and here for the progression of policy changes.) For more coverage on neonicotinoids, see its dedicated Daily News section at the link above.

Join the battle to protect the right to sue when pesticide manufacturers fail to warn users about the hazards of their products. See previous Action of the Week to weigh in.

Beyond Pesticides called on Monsanto-Bayer to end its operations in Hawai’i after pleading guilty to multiple crimes, including pesticide use violations and putting field workers at risk. In both cases, they admit that they knowingly violated pesticide law and put field workers in harm’s way. (See Daily News here.)

In the spirit of moving beyond toxic pesticide reliance, Beyond Pesticides coordinated with the Center for Food Safety and numerous farmworker organizations to urge EPA to suspend the registration of glyphosate. (See Daily News here and petition here.)

While the future of EPA is in question under the Trump administration, the agency set in its suspension all uses of the weed killer Dacthal/DCPA last August, which Beyond Pesticides calls “The Dacthal Standard” because it recognized serious concerns about fetal hormone disruption and resulting “low birth weight and irreversible and life-long impacts to children [impaired brain development, decreased IQ, and impaired motor skills] exposed in-utero” and found that there are no “practicable mitigation measures” to protect against these hazards. Beyond Pesticides has launched campaigns to apply The Dacthal Standard to numerous pesticides, including atrazine and paraquat. Next up is chlorpyrifos, while we seek to apply The Dacthal Standard to additional toxic pesticides.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides. 

Source: Canada’s National Observer

(Beyond Pesticides, December 17, 2024) A systematic review of studies on pesticides as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) on body weight, published in Biomedicines, evaluates 36 clinical and preclinical studies and links their agricultural use to obesity. The authors, with the lead researchers from the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at Catholic University of Valencia San Vincente, Valencia, Spain, assess studies on a range of pesticides, including organophosphates, pyrethroids, neonicotinoids, and others. In addition to concluding that the EDCs promote obesity, they report that the chemicals cause “other anthropometric changes by altering lipid and glucose metabolism, modifying genes, or altering hormone levels such as leptin.”

Endocrine disruption and obesity are public health concerns, and there is a wide body of science linking pesticide exposure to these effects (see more here). “Obesity is considered to be a worldwide pandemic that leads to an increase in medical costs and thus becomes a public health problem,” the researchers share. They continue, “[Obesity] is also associated with the increased production of environmental chemicals, also called environmental obesogens, used mainly in agriculture, as disease vector control, helping to prevent harmful effects caused by fungi, bacteria, or even pests, using pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides, or endocrine disruptors (ED), which interfere in different processes.”

In analyzing five human cross-sectional studies, 24 animal studies, and seven in vitro studies published since 2000, the authors investigate how environmental and dietary pesticide exposure is associated with anthropometric parameters, such as weight and body mass index (BMI), and metabolic changes that promote fat accumulation and adipogenesis (the process of creating fat cells).

Within the observational human studies, the pesticides evaluated span many different chemical families. These include: 2,4,5-dichlorophenol (2,4-D and 2,5-D, phenoxy herbicides); imidacloprid, acetamiprid, and clothianidin (neonicotinoid insecticides); glyphosate (phosphanoglycine herbicide); diuron (dimethylurea herbicide); chlorpyrifos (organophosphate insecticide); permethrin (synthetic pyrethroid insecticide); mancozeb and maneb (ethylene bisdithiocarbamate fungicides); carbendazim and thiophanate (carbamate fungicides); and benomyl (benzimidazole fungicide). The studies compare urinary concentrations of the pesticides to weight gain and obesity. Three of the studies use data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) for children and adolescents aged 6–19 years and adults aged 20–85 years.

“Participants with obesity were found to have higher urinary concentrations of 2,4-D and 2,5-D. Higher concentrations of these pesticides were associated with increased BMI and waist circumference,” the authors note. “As in children, the adult study showed a higher prevalence of obesity with higher urinary levels of 2,4-D and 2,5-D.” The additional studies find that carbendazim, thiophanate, benomyl, metalaxyl, propineb, and chlorpyrifos show a statistically significant association with obesity prevalence.

In the studies on animals, 17 focus on species of mice while the other seven use rats, with nine of the 24 studies investigating chlorpyrifos. “[T]o evaluate the effect of pesticides on obesity, BMI, waist circumference, weight gain, and fat mass were the main measures used. In addition, several studies assessed biochemical parameters such as insulin levels, blood glucose, serum leptin, thyroid hormones, and lipid profile, as well as biomarkers and indicators of lipid metabolism,” the researchers explain.

As a result, chlorpyrifos exposure is associated with increased body mass, adiposity, impaired glucose tolerance, and insulin sensitivity in mice and rats when combined with a high-fat diet. It is also observed to alter gut microbiota, which can have “a significant effect on weight gain, serum-free lipopolysaccharide concentrations, and fasting glucose. Furthermore, this alteration could promote body weight gain, insulin resistance, and glucose intolerance,” the authors say.

Chlorpyrifos also alters intestinal permeability and causes an increase in lipopolysaccharide levels, “which could induce chronic inflammation and promote the development of insulin resistance and obesity. In addition, chlorpyrifos exposure may alter leptin levels, which could be associated with increased fat deposition, and a strong correlation was found between increased leptin levels and weight gain,” the researchers find.

Additional effects are noted with exposure to the organophosphate malathion (increased body weight and serum glucose levels in mice), synthetic pyrethroids bifenthrin and permethrin (significantly increased body weight, fat mass, and serum cholesterol levels in mice), and lambda-cyhalothrin and cypermethrin (increased plasma concentrations of free fatty acids, increased cholesterol, and increased hepatic triglyceride levels).

In mice, exposure to the neonicotinoid imidacloprid causes significant increases in body weight and adipose tissue, as well as increased serum glucose levels, insulin, and leptin levels, while exposure to thiamethoxam results in “[i]ncreased epididymal and retroperitoneal adipose tissue in males, increased omental adipose tissue in females, and increased adipocyte size.” Both imidacloprid and thiamethoxam exposure leads to increased levels of TG [triglycerides], free fatty acids, and cholesterol in male mice.

Seven in vitro studies evaluate the “effects of pesticides on the anatomy and physiology of hepatocytes and adipocytes” and the prevalence of obesity. Regarding hepatocytes, which are cells primarily in the liver that play a role in metabolism, cis-Bifenthrin is found to increase intracellular triglyceride levels in these cells after just 24 hours.

Adipocytes, fat cells found in adipose tissue, experience impacts from multiple pesticides:

• β-Cypermethrin induces autophagy and adipogenesis by increasing oxidative stress.
• Exposure to quizalofop-p-ethyl, dicamba, and isoxaflutole promotes lipid accumulation.
• Chlorpyrifos leads to a “significant increase in the number of differentiated adipocytes and their internal lipid storage capacity. In addition, there was an increase in the expression of PPARγ and C/EBPα transcription factors involved in the function of adipogenesis.”
• Treatment with fipronil significantly increases the triglyceride content in adipocytes, as well as causes changes in differentiation and lipid metabolism within the cells.
• Adipocytes exposed to imidacloprid show an increase in fat droplets, as well as a higher accumulation of triglycerides and enzymes responsible for lipogenesis (a metabolic process for creating fat).
• The carbamate fenoxycarb increases lipid accumulation and reduces adipocyte viability at high concentrations. This pesticide also causes an increase in the expression of genes, PPARγ and FATP1, which are involved in fat transport.
• Pyriproxyfen exposure induces an increase in lipid deposition.

“This systematic review shows the association between pesticide use and a greater tendency to be overweight and obese,” the authors conclude. In highlighting the disruption of biological processes, such as metabolism, and changes in the expression levels of genes, more evidence of pesticides as EDCs is added to existing scientific literature.  

“EDs have been implicated in a variety of adverse effects, including neurotoxicity, autism spectrum disorder and developmental delays in children after prenatal exposure, impaired behavior, learning, memory, attention, sensation and neurodevelopment, depression and anxiety in children, reduced fertility in women due to increased polycystic ovarian syndrome or premature ovarian failure, and even breast or vaginal cancer,” the researchers state. “EDs can also affect fertility in men, especially in the case of some pesticides. They are also associated with endocrine disruption, causing thyroid dysfunction, affecting both iodine uptake and thyroid hormone metabolism, and interfering with insulin physiology, becoming a risk factor for the development of diabetes.”

As the researchers mention, “The World Health Organization (WHO) has also recognized EDCs as a public health priority, emphasizing the need for improved regulatory strategies and public education to protect vulnerable populations… Government agencies and regulators need to consider these findings to develop stronger regulations and promote good agricultural practices that protect both the environment and human health.”

While many countries have bans in place for some EDCs, pesticides in the U.S. are still registered and available on the market without a regulatory framework for evaluating endocrine-disrupting effects. The long half-life of EDCs is also of concern as levels can be detected in the environment and within the body for many years after use. With agricultural pesticides such as EDCs, there are high risks associated with both environmental and dietary exposure.

“There is evidence that some pesticides can be endocrine disruptors and, among some of their effects, we find alterations in pubertal development and in the function of the thyroid gland, which could be related to a greater tendency of obesity,” the authors note. A keynote speaker at Beyond Pesticides’ 41st National Forum: Imperatives for a Sustainable Future—Reversing the existential crises of pesticide-induced illness, biodiversity collapse, and the climate emergency, Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH, has written in the New England Journal of Medicine, “We need to recognize the very real harm that petrochemicals [including pesticides] are having on people’s health. Many of these fossil-fuel-based chemicals are endocrine disruptors, meaning they interfere with hormonal systems, and they are part of the disturbing rise in disease.” Dr. Woodruff’s Forum talk is available here.

To mitigate these health risks, the adoption of organic land management as a holistic solution is necessary. Removing the use of petrochemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, especially in agriculture, prevents toxic chemicals from being present in our food and protects the health of all organisms and the environment. Take action to expand the Organic Dairy Product Promotion Program to all-organic lunches, as all kids should have access to safe and healthy food.

Make The Safer Choice to avoid hazardous home, garden, community, and food use pesticides and join the Parks for a Sustainable Future program. You can also become a member of Beyond Pesticides. By doing so, you can add your voice to the urgent movement to eliminate fossil fuel-based pesticide use within the next 10 years and advocate for public health and the environment.

All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.

Source:

Pérez-Bermejo, M. et al. (2024) Impact of Endocrine Disrupting Pesticide Use on Obesity: A Systematic Review, Biomedicines. Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9059/12/12/2677.

(Beyond Pesticides, December 16, 2024) The fact that three-quarters of all U.S. fruits and nuts and one-third of all U.S. vegetables are grown in California means that all U.S. food eaters have a stake in how food is grown there. California is proposing the continued use of the fumigant 1,3-dichloropropene (1,3-D, also known as Telone), which can cause deadly effects to farmworkers and endocrine disrupting effects to communities of people exposed through nontarget chemical drift from farmland.

So, it is with deep concern that Beyond Pesticides is urging the state of California, where the chemical is undergoing review, to ban the toxicant. Endocrine disruption, an adverse effect for which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has never completed a pesticide testing protocol, adversely affects the functioning of glands and hormones and is linked to major life-threatening diseases in most organ systems in the body—contributing to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, early puberty, infertility and other reproductive disorders, and childhood and adult cancers.

In a recently released draft regulation, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) will allow highly elevated exposure to 1,3-D, ignoring the scientific literature and advice of the state’s own toxicologists at its Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA). CDPR is proposing to allow continued community exposure to 1,3-D at levels that are fourteen times higher than the State’s official cancer risk level, perpetuating environmental racism and endangering vulnerable communities.  

CDPR’s draft regulation applies separate and unequal standards for different groups, allowing children and adult residents near agricultural fields to be exposed to significantly higher cancer risks than workers in neighboring fields—the “occupational bystanders.” This discrepancy is unjustifiable and fails to uphold the principles of equity and environmental justice. 

For decades, 1,3-D has harmed communities, particularly Latino and Indigenous populations, who are disproportionately exposed to the pesticide. The state’s toxicologists have set a cancer risk exposure level of air concentrated with 1,3-D at 0.04 parts per billion (ppb) per day. Yet, CDPR has adopted one regulation and is proposing another for the same pesticide: one adopts the 1,3-D manufacturer Dow Chemical’s preferred exposure standard of 0.56 ppb per day for residents and children, while the other uses the OEHHA standard for occupational bystanders. Even for occupational bystanders, by disregarding off-the-clock exposure, DPR proposes implementing only 100-foot buffer zones, entirely inadequate for protection against a fumigant that can drift for miles at harmful levels.

Public health advocates think it is outrageous that EPA and CDPR would allow farmworkers—whose labor was judged “essential” during the pandemic—to be routinely exposed to highly toxic pesticides, which could be replaced by organic practices.

1,3-D is a pre-plant soil fumigant registered for use on soils to control nematodes. It is allowed on all crops and is often used with chloropicrin, another highly toxic fumigant, to increase its herbicidal and fungicidal properties. 1,3-D causes cancer. In addition, the National Institutes of Health’s PubChem states, “Occupational exposure is likely to be through inhalation and via the skin. Irritation of the eyes and the upper respiratory mucosa appears promptly after exposure. Dermal exposure caused severe skin irritations. Inhalation may result in serious signs and symptoms of poisoning with lower exposures resulting in depression of the central nervous system and irritation of the respiratory system. Some poisoning incidents have occurred in which persons were hospitalized with signs and symptoms of irritation of the mucous membrane, chest discomfort, headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness and, occasionally, loss of consciousness and decreased libido.” Chloropicrin is extremely irritating to lungs, eyes, and skin. Inhalation may lead to pulmonary edema, possibly resulting in death. 

These and other soil fumigants not only pose severe health threats to farmworkers and bystanders but also threaten soil and water ecosystems. In contrast, organic production seeks to build healthy soils that resist plant pathogens, making fumigation unnecessary. Thus, these fumigants pose unreasonable adverse effects on humans and the environment and should be banned. 

The public has an opportunity to comment and Tell EPA and Congress to cancel the registration of all toxic soil fumigants and encourage organic alternatives. 

In addition, after submitting this Action, there is an option to copy/paste comments directly to the California Department of Pesticide Regulation website. [Unfortunately, a “click and submit” form is currently not available for CDPR comment.]

Comment to California Department of Pesticide Regulation
The California Department of Pesticide Regulation’s (DPR) draft regulation for the cancer-causing pesticide 1,3-dichloropropene (1,3-D, also known as Telone) continues to allow for exposure levels that are fourteen times higher than the State’s official cancer risk level, perpetuating environmental racism and endangering vulnerable communities.

DPR’s draft regulation applies separate and unequal standards for different groups, allowing children and adult residents near agricultural fields to be exposed to significantly higher cancer risks than workers in neighboring fields—the “occupational bystanders.” This discrepancy is unjustifiable and fails to uphold the principles of equity and environmental justice.

It is outrageous that the DPR would allow farmworkers—whose labor was judged “essential” during the pandemic—to be routinely exposed to highly toxic pesticides, which could be replaced by organic practices.

For decades, 1,3-D has harmed communities, particularly Latino and Indigenous populations, who are disproportionately exposed to the pesticide. The State’s own toxicologists at the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) have set an acceptable cancer risk exposure level of air concentrated with 1,3-D at 0.04 parts per billion (ppb) per day. Yet, DPR has adopted one regulation and is proposing another for the same pesticide: one adopts the 1,3-D manufacturer Dow Chemical’s preferred exposure standard of 0.56 ppb per day for residents and children, while the other uses the OEHHA standard for occupational bystanders. Even for occupational bystanders, by disregarding off-the-clock exposure, DPR proposes implementing only 100-foot buffer zones, entirely inadequate for protections against a fumigant that can drift for miles at harmful levels.

1,3-D is a pre-plant soil fumigant registered for use on soils to control nematodes. It is allowed on all crops and is often used with chloropicrin, another highly toxic fumigant, to increase its herbicidal and fungicidal properties. 1,3-D causes cancer. In addition, the National Institutes of Health’s PubChem states, “Occupational exposure is likely to be through inhalation and via the skin. Irritation of the eyes and the upper respiratory mucosa appears promptly after exposure. Dermal exposure caused severe skin irritations. Inhalation may result in serious signs and symptoms of poisoning with lower exposures resulting in depression of the central nervous system and irritation of the respiratory system. Some poisoning incidents have occurred in which persons were hospitalized with signs and symptoms of irritation of the mucous membrane, chest discomfort, headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness and, occasionally, loss of consciousness and decreased libido.” Chloropicrin is extremely irritating to lungs, eyes, and skin. Inhalation may lead to pulmonary edema, possibly resulting in death.

DPR must prioritize the health and safety of California’s most vulnerable residents and adopt a single health-protective standard of 1,3-D air concentrations of 0.04 ppb for all Californians, ensuring equal protection from this carcinogenic pesticide. 1,3-D and other soil fumigants not only pose severe health threats to farmworkers and bystanders, but also threaten soil and water ecosystems. In contrast, organic production seeks to build healthy soils that resist plant pathogens, making fumigation unnecessary. Thus, these fumigants pose unreasonable adverse effects on humans and the environment and should be eliminated.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent issue.

Comment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
The California Department of Pesticide Regulation’s (CDPR) draft regulation for the cancer-causing pesticide 1,3-dichloropropene (1,3-D, also known as Telone) continues to allow for exposure levels that are fourteen times higher than the State’s official cancer risk level, perpetuating environmental racism and endangering vulnerable communities.

CDPR’s draft regulation applies separate and unequal standards for different groups, allowing children and adult residents near agricultural fields to be exposed to significantly higher cancer risks than workers in neighboring fields—the “occupational bystanders.” This discrepancy is unjustifiable and fails to uphold the principles of equity and environmental justice.

It is outrageous that CDPR would allow farmworkers—whose labor was judged “essential” during the pandemic—to be routinely exposed to highly toxic pesticides, which could be replaced by organic practices.

CDPR’s draft regulation highlights the dangers to which farmworkers are routinely exposed. It is outrageous that the Environmental Protection Agency would allow farmworkers—whose labor was judged “essential” during the pandemic—to be routinely exposed to highly toxic pesticides, which could be replaced by organic practices.

1,3-D is a pre-plant soil fumigant registered for use on soils to control nematodes. It is allowed on all crops and is often used with chloropicrin, another highly toxic fumigant, to increase its herbicidal and fungicidal properties. 1,3-D causes cancer. In addition, the National Institutes of Health’s PubChem states, “Occupational exposure is likely to be through inhalation and via the skin. Irritation of the eyes and the upper respiratory mucosa appears promptly after exposure. Dermal exposure caused severe skin irritations. Inhalation may result in serious signs and symptoms of poisoning with lower exposures resulting in depression of the central nervous system and irritation of the respiratory system. Some poisoning incidents have occurred in which persons were hospitalized with signs and symptoms of irritation of the mucous membrane, chest discomfort, headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness and, occasionally, loss of consciousness and decreased libido.” Chloropicrin is extremely irritating to the lungs, eyes, and skin. Inhalation may lead to pulmonary edema, possibly resulting in death. 

1,3-D and other soil fumigants not only pose severe health threats to farmworkers and bystanders but also threaten soil and water ecosystems. In contrast, organic production seeks   to build healthy soils that resist plant pathogens, making fumigation unnecessary. Thus, these fumigants pose unreasonable adverse effects on humans and the environment. Their registrations should be canceled.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent issue.

Comment to the U.S. Congress
The California Department of Pesticide Regulation’s (CDPR) draft regulation for the cancer-causing pesticide 1,3-dichloropropene (1,3-D, also known as Telone) continues to allow for exposure levels that are fourteen times higher than the State’s official cancer risk level, perpetuating environmental racism and endangering vulnerable communities.

CDPR’s draft regulation applies separate and unequal standards for different groups, allowing children and adult residents near agricultural fields to be exposed to significantly higher cancer risks than workers in neighboring fields—the “occupational bystanders.” This discrepancy is unjustifiable and fails to uphold the principles of equity and environmental justice.

It is outrageous that CDPR would allow farmworkers—whose labor was judged “essential” during the pandemic—to be routinely exposed to highly toxic pesticides, which could be replaced by organic practices.

CDPR’s draft regulation highlights the dangers to which farmworkers are routinely exposed. It is outrageous that the Environmental Protection Agency would allow farmworkers—whose labor was judged “essential” during the pandemic—to be routinely exposed to highly toxic pesticides, which could be replaced by organic practices.

1,3-D is a pre-plant soil fumigant registered for use on soils to control nematodes. It is allowed on all crops and is often used with chloropicrin, another highly toxic fumigant, to increase its herbicidal and fungicidal properties. 1,3-D causes cancer. In addition, the National Institutes of Health’s PubChem states, “Occupational exposure is likely to be through inhalation and via the skin. Irritation of the eyes and the upper respiratory mucosa appears promptly after exposure. Dermal exposure caused severe skin irritations. Inhalation may result in serious signs and symptoms of poisoning with lower exposures resulting in depression of the central nervous system and irritation of the respiratory system. Some poisoning incidents have occurred in which persons were hospitalized with signs and symptoms of irritation of the mucous membrane, chest discomfort, headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness and, occasionally, loss of consciousness and decreased libido.” Chloropicrin is extremely irritating to the lungs, eyes, and skin. Inhalation may lead to pulmonary edema, possibly resulting in death.

1,3-D and other soil fumigants not only pose severe health threats to farmworkers and bystanders but also threaten soil and water ecosystems. In contrast, organic production seeks to build healthy soils that resist plant pathogens, making fumigation unnecessary. Thus, these fumigants pose unreasonable adverse effects on humans and the environment. 

Please tell EPA that their registrations should be canceled. 

Thank you for your attention to this urgent issue.