pesticide case filed today

[Guest guest]

A coalition of eleven public health, environmental, and farmworker groups

(including Farmworker Legal Services of New York) sued the Bush Administration

EPA today for failing to protect children from pesticides as required by the

Food Quality Protection Act of 1996.  The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are NRDC,

Pesticide Action Network North America, the Breast Cancer Fund, Physicians for

Social Responsibility, New York Public Interest Research Group, Farmworker

Legal Services of New York, Citizens Campaign for the Environment,

Neighborhood

Network Research Center, Citizens' Environmental Coalition, the Mid-Hudson

Catskill Rural and Migrant Ministry, and Environmental Advocates of New York. 

The states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts filed their

own separate action challenging the same policies.

The Environmental Protection Agency has failed to adequately protect children

from dangerous pesticides, according to two lawsuits filed today, one by a

coalition of conservation, public health and farmworker organizations, and the

other by four states. The lawsuits charge that EPA is violating the 1996 Food

Quality Protection Act, a bipartisan law passed unanimously by Congress

requiring the agency--for the first time in an environmental law--to protect

the health of infants and children. The suits are being filed today in federal

district court in New York City.

The lawsuits ask the court to force EPA to comply with the Food Quality

Protection Act's key provision requiring the agency to protect infants and

children 10 times more stringently than adults, unless it can show that

children do not have special sensitivities or exposure. Congress inserted this

" safety factor " in the law on the recommendation of the National Academy of

Sciences, which found that infants and children are more susceptible and more

exposed to many toxic pesticides than adults. A year ago, EPA's independent

scientific review panel on pesticides, called the Scientific Advisory Panel,

found that the agency erred by failing to apply the tenfold safety factor when

reviewing the cumulative risks of organophosphate insecticides, which are

among

the most dangerous pesticides on the market.

The suit also faults EPA for failing to designate the children of farmworkers,

farmers and rural residents as a highly exposed subpopulation and take their

exposures into account when regulating pesticides used on food.  This, too, is

required under the FQPA.  Farmworker kids are far more exposed to pesticides

than are other children, through pesticide residues on their parents' skin and

clothing, contaminated soil in their play areas, pesticide-contaminated dust

tracked into their homes, food eaten directly from the fields, and

contaminated

air and well-water etc.  Farmworker children also accompany their parents to

the fields and often work along side their parents from age 8 onwards.

Counsel in this case are NRDC, FJF and Earthjustice.  For a copy of the

complaint, plese send me an email.

(For more background on the law, you can also go to

http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/030915a.asp.)