Pesticide Test for Whitman’s EPA

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman should not cave in to pesticide industry pressure to overturn a court settlement approved by her predecessor in a case brought by California activists. Chiefly at issue are acceptable limits of some highly toxic chemicals in food and water consumed by children.

Agriculture industry leaders suggest that Whitman, who has only a week to decide whether to accept the settlement, should reject it because she is too new in her job to comprehend it. Douglas Nelson, senior vice president of the American Crop Protection Assn., actually said that Whitman “doesn’t understand what she is committing her agency to do.”

Whitman may be in for a long haul in dealing with the pesticide industry, and the last thing she should do is give in to their head-patting condescension. She has science and common sense on her side.

The modest settlement was reached with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Breast Cancer Fund and the United Farm Workers in a federal courtroom in San Francisco Jan. 19. Because that was Bill Clinton’s last full day in the White House, the agriculture industry is portraying the settlement as one of many overreaching regulations that Clinton quietly tried to muscle into law at the eleventh hour.

In fact, the settlement does nothing more than ask the EPA to start living up to existing laws. It requires the agency to evaluate the few most dangerous of an array of pesticides that were supposed to be regulated under the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996. That bill required the EPA to set more than 9,000 “tolerance levels”--pesticide residue levels considered safe in various foods--by 2002.

EPA scientists had planned to set lower tolerance levels for foods likely to be eaten raw and to adopt extra safety margins for foods likely to be consumed by infants and other children, whose immune systems are more vulnerable than those of adults. However, the agency, buckling to industry pressure, has not yet imposed tolerance levels on any of the chemicals that environmental scientists consider to be of highest risk.

The settlement would not much change that, merely requiring the agency to set preliminary, nonbinding caps on 11 chemicals that animal studies have found to be most toxic, including some widely used organophosphate insecticides and the triazine family of herbicides--weed killers that often get into drinking water.

Whitman would not be performing any kind of regulatory or scientific stretch in beginning to protect consumers--particularly youngsters--from unnecessarily risky exposure.