Groups Oppose White House on Pesticide Curbs

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), California Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) and a coalition of environmental groups launched a campaign Wednesday to defeat a White House proposal that would prevent states from imposing more stringent pesticide restrictions than the federal government.

“I am convinced we will win,” said Hayden, “but it will be a long, complicated, and costly fight because of the fierce opposition of the food industry and others fighting us in California.”

Waxman promised to lead the fight in Congress against provisions in the Administration program. Waxman has introduced a tougher food safety bill and will chair House subcommittee hearings on the White House plan.

The campaign was announced at a Capitol Hill press conference less than a month after the Bush Administration unveiled plans for the overhaul of regulations controlling pesticide residues in food products.

Environmentalists have attacked the Administration plan as a retreat from effective food safety regulation. They are particularly concerned about the state preemption provision and a new definition of “negligible” cancer risk in the Administration plan.

Under current law, the Environmental Protection Agency can remove a pesticide from the market or take other enforcement actions if it determines that the substance poses more than a negligible risk of cancer.

Negligible risk currently is defined as more than one cancer death per 1 million people apparently caused by exposure to a carcinogen. The Administration proposal would relax the standard to one cancer death per 100,000 people.

Waxman said that the relaxed standard “would put public health at even greater danger than it is today.”

Waxman is chairman of the health and environment subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The panel is expected to take up both the Administration initiative and an alternative food safety bill introduced by Waxman.

The White House has touted its initiative as a major step in pesticide control because it would tighten registration requirements, stiffen sanctions against violators and reduce the time required for the government to remove dangerous pesticides from the market.

But the provision blocking states such as California from enacting more stringent regulations and the relaxed cancer risk standard have created an uproar among environmentalists.

Hayden, a principal architect of California’s 1990 environmental ballot initiative, charged Wednesday that the Administration package was “aimed squarely at existing California law and future California law.”

He called it “a direct attempt to interfere with the right of states like California to set tough standards protecting people against cancer-causing pesticides. The President’s proposal means a tenfold increase in the risk of exposure to dangerous chemicals and would prevent California from passing tougher standards in 1990.”

The California Department of Food and Agriculture has been at odds with federal authorities over pesticides for several years, repeatedly disagreeing with EPA’s analysis of pesticide hazards.

The state already has gone beyond federal controls, and if approved, next year’s ballot initiative would phase out all cancer-causing pesticides by 1996.

Waxman and Hayden were joined by representatives of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, the Consumer Pesticide Project, Public Citizen, and Public Voice for Food and Health Policy.

Although Waxman and the advocacy groups generally are in agreement on the Administration proposal, some of the environmentalists hope to amend the Waxman bill to require a phase-out of all carcinogenic pesticides.

While not endorsing the looser negligible risk standard contained in the Administration program, Waxman’s legislation would allow the EPA to continue to approve or reject pesticides based on mathematical risk assessments.

Risk assessment techniques, said Jay Feldman of the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, are “highly questionable” when used by a “highly politicized Environmental Protection Agency.”

Legislation that would preempt states from going beyond federal pesticide restrictions is also pending before the House Agriculture Committee, where it was co-sponsored by two California lawmakers, Reps. Leon Panetta (D-Carmel Valley) and George E. Brown Jr. (D-Riverside).