March, 1999
By Matt McCallum
Confused about what effect the Food Quality Protection Act will have on the future of growing fruit and vegetables?
A panel discussion during the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Conference in early February in San Diego, put together by the U.S. Apple Association on the 1996 law, was supposed to help clear the smoke, but generally added to the fire.
All sides of the issue were present on the panel including: Bill Jordan, special assistant to EPA’s office of the director of pesticide programs; Jeannine Kenney, Consumers Union policy analyst for pesticides; Jim Kuntsman, Bayer Corporation; and Wally Ewart, Northwest Horticultural Council.
FQPA was supposed to take away the issue of residues and come up with a more scientific approach to pesticide use in foods along with protecting infants and children from pesticide exposure. In the end it’s turned out that the devil is in the details of how the EPA decides to implement it and all sides want their ideas implemented.
Transition time
One major issue surfaced during the panel discussion about the future use of organophosphates and carbamates that will be pivotal in how EPA implements the FQPA and what effects the new rules will have on the fruit and vegetable industry. If the EPA decides to severely curtail or cancel some OP and carbamate uses, and there are no realistic alternatives available to growers, will the agency take that into account and/or give growers a transition time?
"What are you going to do if you cancel something and we have no alternatives? Are you still going to cancel it?," Ewart asked EPA’s Jordan.
EPA has been thinking long and hard on that issue, Jordan said.
"We believe we can say credibly that there is a problem with a compound," he said. "We don’t have some secret plan to cancel a specific number of pesticides on a certain date. There are lots of ways to reduce risks other than canceling a compound. The last resort would be to cancel."
Some of the ways the EPA will look to reduce risk would be to lengthen the post-harvest interval, change formulations, lower application rates or change application rates.
"If those won’t work, then we have a hard choice to make," Jordan said. "Public input will be decisive in how we make our decision."
To Consumers Union, implementing the FQPA would be easy. All EPA has to do is eliminate what the environmental group defines as the 40 "worst" insecticide-food combinations on nine fruit and vegetable crops that account for a large portion of kids’ overall dietary insecticide exposure and risk and voila! — 95% of the risks associated with insect pest management on the foods children eat would be eliminated.
"We’re not as concerned about pesticide use on asparagus as we are on apples because of the risk to children. They drink nine times more apple juice than adults do," Kenney said.
Jordan was asked if the EPA could do what Consumers Union was proposing.
"Yes and no," he said. "From the standpoint of where the greatest risks are, Consumers Union’s point is logically sound, that we should spend the most time on chemicals in which the largest share is used on at-risk groups. The fact that there are 1,200 uses for OPs and carbamates and Consumers Union says focus on 40, we like. But there are immediate things we can do to mitigate the risks on those and we are doing that."
Bayer is taking the stance that its OP, Guthion, is safe to use and should not be curtailed under FQPA, Kuntsman said.
"The EPA has registered it and growers have used it safely for over 40 years," he said. "We’ve done a number of new residue studies and health and safety studies to make sure there isn’t anything we overlooked."
The fight to keep Guthion will cost growers money. Bayer has spent $2.5 million on the additional studies to satisfy EPA’s latest queries regarding Guthion. Bayer is passing the cost back to the growers by increasing the chemical’s cost by 10%.
Alternatives
Consumers Union proposes banning the 40 uses in two to three years to give the industry enough time to come up with alternatives. But, banning a group of pesticides isn’t the way to approach the problem, said Northwest Horticultural Council’s Ewart.
"Reducing use doesn’t make sense, we want to reduce risk," he said. "They (Consumers Union) aren’t taking into account the complicated pest management systems we have to work with."
Banning OPs and carbamates will cause more harm than good including disruption of IPM programs, increased spraying because some chemicals will lose their effectiveness or pests would become resistant to them, Ewart said.
"We’ve spent millions to develop alternatives and some have come forward with good results, but it takes years," he said. "It took us 15 years to put in a mating disruption program in the Northeast and it’s not working perfectly. You just can’t replace compound A with compound B and C."
Consumers Union believes that grower groups and chemical companies are unduly scaring America by saying that there aren’t any viable alternatives to OPs and carbamates.
"If all of the rumors were true, then there would have been legitimate concern," she said. "We did a study and there are alternatives out there that will work."
The study called: "Worst First: High-Risk Insecticides, Children’s Foods & Safer Alternatives," was released in September 1998. In it, Consumers Union laid out all of the alternatives available to growers. Many in the fruit and vegetable industry say the alternatives suggested aren’t realistic and wouldn’t be as effective as OPs and carbamates.
The panel went back and forth on the issue of alternatives and transition periods for the industry.
"Before we have a discussion on what a transition period means, we must define what "no alternatives" means," Kenney said. "We haven’t seen the apple industry come forward and say where there are alternatives and where there are not. We are frustrated that they only seem to talk about transition."
Ewart said the apple industry has given EPA a report on the alternatives that are available to growers.
"Resistance issues are changing all the time," he said. "It won’t all be solved by chemical companies coming up with new products."
The fruit and vegetable industry shouldn’t worry about the loss of a chemical, because the EPA will let growers know well in advance if there are problems with a compound, Jordan said.
"We will work with groups to come up with a transition and plans if we have to remove a pesticide," he said. "In some cases EPA will take regulatory action that removes, from the marketplace, pesticides. It is not possible to have no disruption, but we are looking at ways to minimize that disruption."
Foreign produce
The new pesticide rules that EPA comes up with under FQPA will be equally applicable to foreign and domestic produce.
Jim Cranney from USApple asked the panel if the EPA says chemical A can’t be used, can foreign growers still use it, even if it would require them to have such a low residue that it would be non-detectable?
"It is a possibility, but the USDA has a new test that will be 10 times more sensitive to OPs than the one they used before, so that problem will be reduced," Jordan said.
Consumers Union doesn’t think U.S. growers would be put at an economic disadvantage because foreign growers could use products banned in the U.S.
"Importers face the same risks as U.S. growers if they use it and it is found out. They can’t sell it here because it is adulterated product," Kenney said. "They wouldn’t take that chance."
Alar anniversary
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Alar scare, Ewart pointed out, and from that experience the apple industry is in a better position to deal with FQPA.
"There’s been many changes since then, but for us, we’ve become a part of the process," he said. "We will find out if all the effort has paid off. We will all have sleepless nights yet, not because EPA or Bayer hasn’t done their job, but because FQPA has so many challenges and coming to a reasonable conclusion will be tough. There’s no silver bullet, it will take many groups lots of time. I hope 10 years from now we will look back and say we’ve come a long way and we still have the safest food supply in the world."
The Fruit Growers News