Company challenges ban on pesticides

TALLAHASSEE — Amid arguments about the troubled citrus industry and the health of farmworkers, a chemical company is challenging a state decision to block a pesticide that could help fight a disease that has caused massive damage in citrus groves.

AgLogic Chemical LLC has filed an administrative challenge, about three weeks after the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services denied an application to use a pesticide known as aldicarb on citrus crops.

Major players in the citrus industry have backed using the pesticide as orange production has plummeted in recent years, in part because of citrus greening disease, which is transmitted by a type of insect. But farmworker and environmental groups have fought the use of aldicarb, contending it poses threats to workers and wildlife.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in January approved the use of aldicarb in the production of Florida oranges and grapefruit. But it also had to be approved by state regulators.

In the challenge Tuesday, AgLogic argued that the state agency’s decision was arbitrary and did not provide an adequate justification for denying the use of aldicarb.

“The department has approved other pesticide registration applications in the same posture as aldicarb but treated AgLogic’s 2021 application differently with no explanation, making its decision entirely arbitrary,” the petition said.

But as her department denied the application April 21, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried pointed to health and environmental risks.

“While there are promising new horizons for fighting citrus greening … aldicarb poses an unacceptable risk to human, animal and environmental health in Florida, is one of the world’s most toxic pesticides and is banned in more than 100 countries,” Fried said in a prepared statement.

Aldicarb applied to the EPA for use of the pesticide on citrus crops in 2019, and the federal agency granted a conditional registration on Jan. 12, 2021.

But the Farmworker Association of Florida, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Environmental Working Group in March challenged the EPA’s decision in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

“This approval of aldicarb is just one more assault on the men and women who harvest our citrus crops in Florida, who do ‘essential’ work but who are treated as dispensable,” said Jeannie Economos, coordinator of the Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Project at the Farmworker Association of Florida.