EPA devotes “small army” and “a lot of resources” to atrazine despite recent re-registration

6/2/2010

Late April saw the third Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) held by EPA in its redundant re-review of the herbicide atrazine.

Entitled, “Re-evaluation of Human Health Effects of Atrazine: Review of Experimental Animal and In Vitro Studies and Drinking Water Monitoring Frequency,” the EPA claims it has devoted a “small army” and “a lot of resources” to atrazine on an accelerated schedule.

Why? 

No water system in the Atrazine Monitoring Program has exceeded the EPA’s protective standards of 3 parts per billion for four years straight. 

In addition to the swift battery of SAPs it scheduled this year, EPA has delayed the September cancer SAP until 2011 but inexplicably still plans to convene its scheduled September panel tacked on yet another SAP on cancer in 2011.

Again, why?

In 2006, EPA had just finished 12 years of evaluation of atrazine.  It determined that atrazine and the triazine herbicides do not cause cancer, and re-registered atrazine as safe for use.  In fact, the new cancer SAP was added in the very same week that a new report from the Agricultural Health Study confirmed that there is no correlation between atrazine and cancer.

In early May, a study from the University of Illinois reported that removing atrazine for sweet corn production would complicate growers’ weed management practices, with other herbicides that are “not well developed or demonstrated.”  Among the farmers hurt would be those who use conservation tillage practices allowing them to do less tilling of the soil—a practice you would expect the environmental activists to love.

What activists love, of course, is regulation and fundraising.

Farmers, consumers, and the environment come last.