Why Stomach This ‘Necessary Evil’? : Public’s Cry Is for Pesticide Action, Not Foot-Dragging
Just what are we doing to our food? Each year in producing the American food supply, farmers use up to 2 billion pounds of chemicals to kill insects, eliminate fungus, destroy weeds, “control” plant growth, increase yields and promote uniform artificial ripening. Many of these chemicals are the most toxic of all human creations, originating from chemical-warfare research during World War II and exploding into use during the biochemical revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.
Where do these toxins go?
Nobody knows. The chemical companies have never adequately tested most of them to identify their long-term chronic health effects on humans--effects such as cancer, genetic mutations, birth defects or neurological disorders. And the methods used by the Food and Drug Administration to test food for “illegal” residues of these poisons can detect less than half of the chemicals used on food.
Lately, national attention has been focused on apples, a pesticide called Alar and its breakdown product, known as UDMH, a powerful carcinogen. Actually, the problem isn’t just apples or Alar--it’s a failed government regulatory system and an unwillingness by agriculture to accept changes in its use of toxic chemicals.
Every day, each of us gets our daily dose of toxic chemicals in the food we eat. Three-hundred different pesticides are used on our food, leaving residues in fruit, vegetables, grain products, even in milk, eggs, poultry and meat. We have been told that this represents a “necessary evil,” the price of our abundant, inexpensive food supply. But is it? And at what cost? Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency decided that the health risks presented by pesticides in food were its No. 1 priority. “Pesticides dwarf the other environmental risks the agency deals with,” said a high-level EPA official. “Toxic-waste dumps may affect a few thousand people who live around them. But virtually everyone is exposed to pesticides.” Yet since then, in addition to foot-dragging on Alar, the agency has continued to act feebly or not at all to protect the food chain. For example, last month it was disclosed that EPA inaction on an extraordinarily toxic pesticide called aldicarb has resulted in up to 80,000 children on any given day being exposed to dangerous levels of this toxic substance in potatoes alone.
It is children who are squarely at the highest risk from an abysmal record of government inaction. The results of a two-year study released by scientists from the Natural Resources Defense Council found that:
--EPA’s supposedly “safe” pesticide residue levels, set up to 20 years ago, were based on the assumed diet of a fully grown adult male and ignored the far different eating habits of children. The cancer risks to children from the actual residues of the eight pesticides analyzed by NRDC were up to several hundred times higher than the cancer risk level designated “acceptable” by EPA.
--Between 5,500 and 6,200 preschoolers might get cancer solely as a result of their exposure by age 6 to the eight common carcinogenic pesticides in fruits and vegetables analyzed in the study. (The EPA has classified 66 pesticides as potential human carcinogens.)
--More than half (55%) of the lifetime risk of developing cancer from exposure to carcinogenic pesticides used on fruit is typically incurred by the time a child reaches age 6.
Meanwhile, the bugs are winning. At least 20 different species of insects have mutated to a form that nothing will kill. We now lose roughly the same percentage of crops to pests as we did during World War II. The farmers? Well, they’re losing. A comprehensive 1987 National Cancer Institute study of Kansas farmers found substantially higher rates of soft tissue sarcoma and lymphoma due to exposure to herbicides. And increasingly, pesticides are turning up in ground water, the sole source of drinking water for people and livestock in 95% of rural America.
What’s to be done? Congress must enact comprehensive legislation, recently introduced by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), setting strict health-based limits on pesticide residues, protecting especially vulnerable subpopulations, such as children, and streamlining procedures to get the worst chemicals off the market quickly. And a well-known group of old, potent carcinogens presenting the bulk of the cancer risk to the American public should be phased out over the next few years.
Opinion polls show that public concern about pesticides is at an all-time high, with 77% of the public now believing pesticides in our food to be a “serious hazard.” Consumers simply are not buying the $10-million food industry ad campaign filled with false claims such as the one that a child would have to eat 28,000 apples a day to be at risk from Alar.
In the long term, agriculture has to break its ties to the chemical industry and get out of the poison business. Chemical reduction goals as a condition of multibillion dollar price supports for surplus crops is an idea worth exploring in this year’s farm bill debate.
But perhaps our best hope for a safe food supply will come from consumer pressure. Major supermarket chains in California, Colorado and Massachusetts--and in Great Britain--are already offering consumers a choice between chemical-free and chemically treated produce, and this trend is likely to continue.
Individual consumers must now act on their concerns and choose health. Change is coming, and let us hope that it is with the active participation of the American farmer.
