Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
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Most recently, the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA)of1996 required
the EPA to begin considering new criteria before approving pesticides: con-
sidering exposures fromall sources (food, water, residential), amethodology
for trying to assess cumulative risk, and special sensitivity to children. In
addition, FQPA requires the EPA to reassess tolerances for old pesticides by
2006, but in the meantime these chemicals are all still on the market, and
we can only hope that the historical data on their safety is accurate (USEPA
1999). This gets to the heart of my information search - which pesticides
have been banned in the United States, and whether they are still obvious
in the environment today. According to the EPA, “Over time, registered
pesticides, or certain uses of a registered pesticide, have been canceled. EPA
does not maintain a listing of canceled pesticides” (USEPA-Canceled Uses
2003). Apparently, once a pesticide is banned, the EPA just pretends it never
existed!
Partial information can be obtained through the EPA's international link-
ages. Luckily, the EPA is mandated by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and
RodenticideAct to informother governments about unregistered or banned
pesticides exported from the United States that may affect importing coun-
tries (USEPA-UN PIC List 2003). In 1998, the UN Environment Programme
and the Food and Agriculture Organization held the Convention in Rotter-
dam to address concerns about health and environmental risks associated
with hazardous chemicals. Because only thirty countries have ratified the
resulting document, it is still only voluntary. But the convention seeks to
make a legally binding obligation that exporting nations list chemicals for
Prior Informed Consent (PIC). According to the UN Convention, the export
of a PIC chemical should take place only with the prior informed consent of
the importing country (UN Report 2003). So the EPA lists sixty-four chem-
icals that are on the UN-PIC list; these are banned in the United States but
still manufactured here and exported (USEPA-UN PIC List 2003). Looking at
this list we see such pesticides as aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin,
and heptachlor.
On the FDAWeb site, there is a report called the
Pesticide Program: Residue
Monitoring
2000 (USFDA 2002). This presents the annual results of FDA
sampling and testing of the U.S. food supply. Specifically, 6,523 samples
of food were collected (2,525 samples of U.S.-produced food from forty-
three states and 3,998 samples of food imported from eighty-two countries)
and analyzed for pesticide residues. Residues were found in 40.4 percent of
domestic samples and in 42.5 percent of the import samples. And of these
detectable pesticides, samples exceeded violation levels in 0.7 percent of
domestic samples and 3.8 percent of import samples, although these rates
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