State fails to protect from pesticide exposure
Department of Pesticide Regulation receives poor grades
The state agency responsible for regulating the pesticide industry received poor grades from an environmental issues coalition.
The state agency responsible for regulating the pesticide industry received poor grades from an environmental issues coalition.
The recently released California Environmental Justice Alliance’s (CEJA’S) 2017 Environmental Justice Agency Assessment provides assessments of nine agencies and lists an additional six agencies to monitor. CEJA partnered with four organizations on the assessment — Californians for Pesticide Reform (CPR), the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), the Community Water Center (CWC) and The People’s Senate.
Angel Garcia with Californians For Pesticide Reform said the assessment gave the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) poor grades for what it claims is persistent failure to prioritize community health over industry profits. He said the agencies were judged on eight CEJA principles, with a score of good, fair or poor for each. Garcia said DPR’S scores were evenly divided between “fair” and “poor.”
Garcia said the assessment specifically cited DPR for its dealings with Dowdupont over the pesticide Telone.
Garcia said the DPR also was dinged in the assessment because they believe it did not take meaningful action on the use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos and for what they consider the “slow” handling of drift incidents in 2017.
Garcia said environmental justice is defined in statute as “the fair treatment of people of all races, cultures and incomes with respect to the development, adoption, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies.” He said the idea that public policy might be shaped in a way that reduces the impact on the most heavily burdened communities has been slowly gaining ground in California.
While some agencies, notably the California Public Utilities Commission and the State Water Resources Control Board, have made strides in including environmental justice principles in their decisionmaking processes, others, like DPR, lag far behind, Garcia said.
Garcia said the assessment of DPR’S performance comes less than a month after their latest annual pesticide use report was released, which he said showed overall use of pesticides close to an all-time high. Garcia said use continues to be concentrated in a handful of agricultural counties, mostly in the San Joaquin Valley and Central Coast.
Marilyn Wright, the agricultural commissioner/sealer for Tulare County, said even though usage for all pesticides did go up, she noted that there has been over 50,000 more acres of permanent plantings.
“So it would make sense that some chemicals, pounds of active ingredients would increase,” Wright said. “But it also depends on pest pressures and temperatures and rainfall and so many variables that you couldn’t pinpoint it to any one thing.”
Wright added that chemical companies do not get to write their own labels and have to pay to the US EPA and DPR to register products.
Wright said she believes the safest food supply in the world is right here in California.
“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at the federal level is responsible for registering pesticides for use and creating labels, and the California registered labels tend to be more restrictive than the federal pesticide labels,” Wright said. “California, through the Department of Pesticide Regulations, can say because of our specialty crops and proximity to urban areas, we are going to put extra restrictions or language about pollinators or water quality requirements.”