News Coverage
Politics, Not Science, Shaped New Pesticide Controls
Published February 1, 2000
Don Brandenburg's future hangs from the trees.
On a perfect 74-degree afternoon on May 12, 1998, he does what he has always done to protect them:
He drops dissolvable plastic packages into a tank of churning water, climbs aboard his 1976 John Deere tractor and pulls the tank through the rows.
Behind him blows a poison wind.
A giant fan whines like a small jet engine, firing the tank's contents into the trees. The young apples, hard and green and no bigger than grapes, tremble with his passing. The wind carries azinphos methyl, the most commonly used insecticide in the Pacific Northwest's apple orchards. On this spring day a little more than a year and a half ago, Brandenburg thought it might be among the last times the pesticide better known as Guthion would shroud his orchard in Rock Island, Wash.
That summer, at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 3,000 miles away, Guthion was facing its first-ever review under the Food Quality Protection Act, a new law aimed at protecting children from dangerous pesticide residues. A year later, the EPA announced "major reductions" in Guthion's use. Environmentalists, editorials and some members of Congress hailed the move as a breakthrough.
But Guthion lives on.
Despite the restrictions announced Aug. 2 of last year, most growers, including Brandenburg, can use Guthion much as they had before.
A six-month review by The Oregonian of Portland, Ore., shows that the new EPA rules on Guthion's use were largely written to satisfy apple growers and the pesticide's manufacturer, Bayer Corp., both of whom argue that the EPA is exaggerating Guthion's risk to children.
Three and a half years ago, when President Clinton signed the Food Quality Protection Act into law, he said, "If a pesticide poses a danger to our children, it won't be in our food, period."
It wasn't that simple.
An inside look at three years of behind-the-scenes wrangling shows how politics not science drives pesticide regulation in the United States.
As a result, the EPA's ability to enforce the landmark pesticide law has been hobbled for years to come.
The law told the agency to stop looking at pesticides one at a time and instead measure children's total exposure to the pesticides on their food, lawns and pets, and in their homes and drinking water.
The story of Guthion shows why that's not being done.
In the end, canny lobbyists and bureaucratic dawdling, a leaked memo and presidential politics, pesticide-eating Scottish students and an odds-making computer program named for a European gambling resort all combined to save a doomed pesticide.
Growers in Washington state, who spray 55 percent of the Guthion that's used in the United States, had seen before what a full-scale pesticide war could do. In 1989, a "60 Minutes" report charged that Alar, a chemical used to keep apples on the tree longer so their red color would deepen, might cause cancer. Apple growers claimed the concern about Alar's health risks bordered on the hysterical. Still, the EPA banned Alar in 1991, but not before the public furor sent apple sales into a plunge.
No one could afford that again.
"If they keep taking away all these chemicals, there isn't going to be an American farmer left," said Dick Smithson, a grower in Peshastin, Wash.
The rules announced in August were the result of a deal that EPA and Bayer had struck only hours earlier. Three smaller makers of azinphos methyl products also signed on, as did the company that produces the raw chemical for Bayer, Israel's Makhteshim-Agan.
Nearly 18 months earlier, Vice President Al Gore had stepped into internal discussions within EPA about writing the new rules for Guthion.
On Feb. 25, 1998, EPA Administrator Carol Browner and her deputy, Fred Hansen, had given their staff 45 days to write a policy that would support the new law.
Meanwhile, growers and pesticide makers had taken their complaints to Gore. Their standard-bearer on Capitol Hill, Texas Rep. Charles Stenholm, the highest ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, had told the vice president that Democrats from key farming states would pay a price at the polls in November for an aggressive pesticide policy.
Stenholm also hinted that Gore's own 2000 presidential hopes in those same states would be hurt. Later, Stenholm characterized his warning to Gore this way: "I don't think anybody that has aspirations for national office wants to take credit for stopping technology in agriculture."
Two days before Browner's deadline, Gore sent a memo to EPA ordering it to conduct an open, public process, something the agency lacked. He told EPA to cooperate with the Agriculture Department, which looks out for farmers' interests. And Gore created an advisory panel to review the way EPA was carrying out the pesticide law.
Gore, the Clinton administration's overseer on environmental issues, was a big supporter of the new pesticide law. But his action was welcomed by agricultural groups and chemical companies, which had feared the EPA might ban some pesticides before they had a chance to weigh in.
"We slowed it down," said Dean Kleckner, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The voluntary agreement that was eventually reached prevented the EPA from launching an expensive and time-consuming cancellation hearing against Guthion, a move that could raise questions about the chemical in other countries.
And the new restrictions required only minimal cuts in Guthion's use.
The new rules capped the total use of Guthion during a growing season at 4.5 pounds per acre, down from 6 pounds allowed previously. But the allowable amount is actually almost twice the average 2.4 pounds per acre of Guthion that growers use nationwide, U.S. Department of Agriculture records show.
In Washington state, where Guthion use is the heaviest, growers use 2.8 pounds an acre.
EPA officials say lowering the per-acre cap will knock out some of the highest Guthion users, but they acknowledge that most growers will not be affected. The EPA also limited overall use to 1.92 million pounds about a 10 percent cut from current levels, which vary from year to year. The cap prevents growers from increasing Guthion use if other bug-killers are banned in the future.
Browner announced Guthion's restrictions at an Aug. 2, 1999 news conference at the EPA's Washington headquarters.
"When a family gathers around the kitchen table, they should know that the food is as safe as it can be for every family member from the youngest to the oldest. And that's what this administration is guaranteeing."
But when it comes to the EPA and pesticides, that's not true.
In fact, the agency isn't even following the law.
The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 required the EPA to weigh risks from all organophosphates together and Guthion by itself consumes almost all of the allowable risk to children.
At least partly as a result of political pressure, the agency is still years away from acting on its own finding that Guthion and 39 other organophosphates together pose an unacceptable risk.
EPA officials say they are still trying to figure out the science that will enable them to act. The agency acknowledges that it may not be able to do so until at least 2001, five years after passage of the Food Quality Protection Act, and after a new president is in office.
Politics may have produced the long delay in drafting rules to implement the law, but politics was also the reason the law had originally passed with dizzying speed and no opposition in either the House or the Senate. The quick and unanimous votes in the summer of 1996 occurred because Republican leaders in Congress seized on the bill, even though it had been proposed by the Clinton White House, to erase an anti-environment image they felt was hurting the GOP with voters.
After passing so hastily, though, the law fell into a kind of vacuum. Congress had acted so fast that farmers, pesticide companies, environmental groups even the legislators who voted for it, and many inside the EPA itself had little or no idea what was in the law or how to carry it out.
Internal EPA records show that, by April 1997, the agency had already concluded that azinphos methyl, the chemical in Guthion, posed a "serious risk concern" all by itself.
However, even within EPA, many had their doubts about the new law. "Basically in the agency it was felt there wasn't a lot of scientific basis for it," said Susan Makris, an EPA toxicologist.
At the start of 1998, a year and a half after the law had passed, the agency still wasn't fully implementing it. Members of Congress and newspaper articles had begun questioning the agency's resolve.
The internal tension reached a crucial point on Feb. 5, 1998, in the pesticide office's headquarters in the Crystal City district of Arlington, Va., just across the Potomac River from Washington.
The Office of Pesticide Programs, under a new director, Marcia Mulkey, presented a memo outlining six options. The least stringent called for putting off the sweeping review of organophosphates until later. The "most stringent" included either banning organophosphates before the next growing season or forcing pesticide companies to justify why their products should stay on the market.
Within days, a leaked copy of the memo arrived by fax at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the American Crop Protection Association, representing 57 pesticide-makers. Soon word of the memo reached the 13 companies that produce most of the world's organophosphates.
In response, the pesticide industry launched a massive lobbying campaign that, even by its critics' estimation, was devastatingly effective in its simplicity. It had one goal: tell Congress that if EPA was not stopped, a political price would be paid.
Pesticide companies mobilized the big grower organizations and co-ops that represented their biggest customers.
Farmers barraged Capitol Hill with letters. In congressional offices, the American Crop Protection Association had growers hand out red fly swatters. Leave things to the EPA, farmers told their representatives, and these fly swatters will be all we have to fight off pests.