The Issue
Pesticides
Millions of people rely on EWG's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce to reduce their exposure to toxic synthetic pesticides used on fruits and vegetables. The alternative is buy organic.
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The Latest on Pesticides
New online videos from a chemical agribusiness front group show conventional growers straining to convince consumers that it's just fine to eat bug killers and weed killers.
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A new study is reinforcing obstetricians’ standard warning that pregnant women should avoid exposure to pesticides in foods and weed killers because the chemicals can harm the developing fetus.
Read MoreKen Cook's keynote talk on organic farming, big agriculture, and the federal farm bill at The Organic Center's 2011 Gala in Anaheim, CA.
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Yesterday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed to cut $30 billion from federal farm subsidy programs, targeting the discredited direct payment program that sends checks out every year regardless of need.
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The battle over a cancer-causing pesticide often applied to California strawberry fields is over. The maker of the highly toxic methyl iodide has pulled the agriculture pesticide from the American marketplace in the face of mounting opposition from the public, leading scientific and public health experts and farmworkers.
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Three common environmental chemicals - lead, organophosphate pesticides and methyl mercury - may have effects on children's IQ in the overall population.
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Tell USDA to stand by its pesticide data program. It's the time of year when the U.S. Department of Agriculture is preparing to release its annual pesticide data – information the Environmental Working Group uses to bring you the Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce, which helps careful consumers minimize their exposure to pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables.
Read MoreIn an interview last week (Jan. 16) at the pesticide lobby's D.C. headquarters, Washington State University Environmental Toxicology Professor Allan Felsot told Energy and Environment News (subscription required): "When you pick up food, you are eating thousands of chemicals at a time."
Read MoreChensheng (Alex) Lu, Associate Professor of Environmental Exposure Biology at Harvard School of Public Health has advised parents and caregivers to use the Shopper's Guide to "keep nutritional foods in their children's diets but avoid the intake of pesticide residues in the high-pesticide-risk items." Lu’s comments came in a study publichsed in Environmental Health Perspectives, that found that about half of the foods most frequently eaten by children were on EWG's Dirty Dozen list.
Read MoreSince the Environmental Working Group released its 2011 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce earlier this year, apologists for the pesticide industry and conventional agribusiness have attacked it.
Read More"I came out of a sound sleep and honestly our entire house was shaking, and I said, 'What is that God-awful roar'," said Stephanie Feller, a resident of Sagewater Court in Fossil Lake Ranch (Colorado). "I thought, 'My God, we are all under attack'. " The "God-awful roar" Feller experienced came from a crop duster, not enemy aircraft, and it wasn't gunfire, but pesticides that hit her property."
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Glyphosate, one of the most heavily used weed-killers in the world, has been found in air, rain and rivers in two states examined by government scientists.
Read MoreIf the thought of eating weed-killer with your watermelon makes your cringe, you’re not alone. Nearly 60 percent of Americans prefer organic over conventional foods.
Read MoreOver the past year, industrial produce growers and pesticide makers have made much ado about EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce, which assembles federal testing data on many fruits and vegetables and makes it easy for consumers to see which have the most pesticide residues – and which have the least.
Read MoreThe produce industry, fresh off a failed attempt to get the federal government to fuzz up the results of its annual tests for pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables, is at it again.
Read MoreEnvironmental Working Group has released the seventh edition of its Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce with updated information on 53 fruits and vegetables and their total pesticide loads. EWG highlights the worst offenders with its “Dirty Dozen” list and the cleanest conventional produce with its “Clean 15” list.
Read MoreIn nearly two decades of research and advocacy on pesticides and human health, Environmental Working Group has never before seen the produce industry take a high-profile role in debates over pesticide policy and safety, as it has this year. Invariably, it was the trade association for the pesticide industry that took the lead.
Read MoreThe U.S. Department of Agriculture ignored the intense pressure from the produce and pesticide industry and released its extensive annual analysis of pesticide residues on fresh fruits and vegetables this week without downplaying any of the findings. The release of the data comes after leading scientists and over 50,000 EWG supporters registered objections with USDA, Environmental Protection Agency, and Food and Drug Administration to the unusual delay in making the information public. In past years, the government made test results made public in January; this year they were four months overdue.
Read MoreOn Friday (May 13), Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook blew the whistle on the agri-chemical lobby's months-long effort to get the government to put the industry's spin on the upcoming annual report on pesticide residues on fresh produce.
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