Return to TFB Main Page
Return to Texas Agriculture Archive

February 2, 2001

Pesticide settlement
a 'slap' to farmers

A last-minute settlement between the Clinton administration and an environmental group of a 1999 lawsuit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act "represents a slap in the face to farmers and ranchers," the American Farm Bureau Federation says.

The settlement agreed to by the Natural Resources Defense Council and EPA "would allow EPA to bypass many of the procedural steps needed to ensure that decisions on pesticide registrations are based on science, not politics," AFBF President Bob Stallman said.

"The timing and deadlines surrounding EPA's settlement with NRDC deprive farmers...in this suit of their ability to have any meaningful opportunity to review the proposal, let alone provide any substantive comment," said Stallman. "EPA has effectively yielded to NRDC without giving farmers a fair chance to comment on how the settlement will affect their ability to produce safe and abundant food," the farm leader stressed.

In 1999, AFBF, the American Crop Protection Association and other industry groups sued EPA, claiming the agency used flawed assumptions and incomplete data when making pesticide regulatory decisions under the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act. The lawsuit also charged that EPA had failed to use customary regulatory rulemaking procedures before announcing its decisions.

Later that year, NRDC separately sued EPA over the agency's implementation of FQPA, claiming the agency failed to meet deadlines in regulating specific classes of chemicals.

"For four-plus years EPA officials and others in the administration paid lip service to the notion that implementation of FQPA must be an open and transparent process, with opportunity for all affected parties to comment, and that the resulting decisions should be based on sound science," Stallman noted. "This settlement belies that notion," he asserted.

"It is unfortunate, but telling, that EPA has chosen to selectively settle just one of the FQPA lawsuits," said Stallman. "We have made several reasonable attempts to settle our suit almost from the beginning but have gotten nowhere. We should have been more cynical and realized that a decision this far-reaching would be made on this administration's last day in office."