Farm Bureau Urges EPA to Abandon Agreement

May 25, 2001

The American Farm Bureau has urged the Environmental Protection Agency to abandon an agreement with an environmental group to settle a lawsuit challenging the agency's implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act. Farm Bureau and other interested parties contend that EPA's settlement with the Natural Resources Defense Council was reached during secret back-room negotiations and has "the potential to create major disruptions to U.S. agriculture and other industries that rely on pest management tools."

The EPA-NRDC agreement settled a 1999 NRDC lawsuit that challenged the agency's FQPA implementation process, saying EPA failed to meet deadlines in regulating specific classes of chemicals. The settlement was agreed to on Jan. 19, the day before the expiration of the Clinton administration, without the knowledge of Farm Bureau and other key FQPA stakeholders.

At the time of the settlement, AFBF President Bob Stallman cried foul, saying the agency had "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." Last week Stallman wrote to EPA Administrator Christine Whitman, saying, "The agency's decision to enter into the (settlement) and to continue defending it, is reckless, contrary to sound public policy, and violative of the FQPA's fairness requirement."

At the heart of the settlement is language that would impose a court-enforceable schedule for crop protection product reviews. Stallman told Whitman that adherence to the timetable would not allow EPA to make decisions using key data in the agency's required reviews of trusted agriculture chemicals. Instead, the agency would be forced by the constricted timetable to use default assumptions - not real-use data - and make premature decisions that are less accurate.

"As a result, farmers will lose many products or product uses, not because science has proved these products to be unsafe, but because the agency was forced to meet a random deadline without adequate data or sound policies to evaluate the data," Stallman said.

Included in the list of crop protection tools that would be affected by the settlement are products that are used on hundreds of crops. And, to compound the impact on producers, some of the products have no reliable replacements. If the result of botched FQPA implementation was a complete loss of the organophosphate and carbamate classes of crop protection products and their agricultural uses, Farm Bureau told Whitman that the economic impact on farmers and the American economy would be tremendous.

"America's overall economy would be harmed by the loss of these products, according to a (Texas A&M University) study," Stallman said. "The nation's total economic output would be decreased by $17 billion. Total value added to U.S. farm commodities by processing would decline $10 billion. Income - for employees, proprietors, and others - would fall by $9 billion. Elimination of pesticides referred to in the settlement would result in the loss of 209,000 U.S. jobs."

Stallman reminded Whitman of the Bush administration's pledge to use sound science and scientific analysis, not politics, to base its decision-making. The farm leader underscored the importance and magnitude of the agency's FQPA implementation strategy. "Haste and arbitrary deadlines are not compatible with sound decisions founded in good scientific data and methodology," Stallman said. "The EPA-NRDC agreement is contrary to your stated objective for EPA and could seriously harm the U.S. agricultural industry."