January 22, 2001

The American Crop Protection Association calls it "11th hour political mischief by the Clinton" Environmental Protection Agency. The American Farm Bureau Federation calls it a "slap in the face to ranchers and farmers." They're referring to a last-minute settlement between the Clinton administration and an environmental group of a 1999 lawsuit challenging the EPA's implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act.

EPA and the Natural Resources Defense Council settled their lawsuit, but an earlier suit brought by farm organizaitons would have provided better protection to consumers by ensuring scientific impolementation of the FQPA, according to Jay J. Vroom, ACPA president. In June 1999 -- nearly two months before NRDC's first lawsuit was filed -- 18 organizations, including the ACPA, AFBF and other grower and pest management groups, filed a lawsuit against EPA for implementing the law without following proper rule-making procedures that would ensure full public participation.

"Why all of a sudden is EPA deviating from Vice President Gore's April 8, 1998, directive for FQPA to be implemented on the basis of sound science, a transparent regulatory process and input from public stakeholders?" asks Vroom. "Industry and agriculture producers have tried for more than a year to settle our lawsuit with EPA. Apparently it takes a political deadline for the agency to take action."

Vroom says the settlement is part of a last-minute regulatory blitz by the Clinton Administration in its final days. "The Clinton EPA has skipped over scientific implementation of the FQPA to meet a political deadline. In doing so, it has attempted to blatantly tie the hands of the next Administration from fairly and scientifically implementing the 1996 law." For example, Vroom says the settlement would aggressively accelerate cumulative safety assessments of pesticides under the FQPA, even though an EPA Scientific Advisory Panel concluded last month that the agency has a long way to go to determine how to conduct such a review.

In addition, Vroom notes, EPA, in its rush to settle, apparently is willing to ignore extensive, comprehensive data being generated in response to EPA formal requests or pursuant to EPA-sanctioned task forces, which will be finalized after these new arbitrary deadlines.

"When political science trumps sound science, everyone loses," says Vroom. "Farmers and others may unnecessarily lose safe and effective pesticides that assure an abundant, diverse and safe food supply and that control disease-carrying pests, such as mosquitoes and cockroaches. Consumers also lose because their confidence is shaken in the safety of our food supply and in the integrity of the regulatory process."

The NRDC filed its lawsuits against EPA in the fall of 1999 in the Northern District Court of California and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

AFBF President Bob Stallman said the settlement agreed to by the NRDC and EPA "would allow EPA to bypass many of the procedural steps needed to ensure that decisions on pesticide registrations are based on science, not politics. The timing and deadlines surrounding EPA's settlement with NRDC deprive farmers and other formal petitioners in this suit of their ability to have any meaningful opportunity to review the proposal, let alone provide any substantive comment."

"EPA has effectively yielded to NRDC without giving America's farmers a fair chance to comment on how the settlement will affect their ability to produce safe and abundant food," Stallman added.