Background:

There are two laws that regulate pesticides. One is FIFRA (Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act), which is a law that determines if pesticides are or are not registered. In the past, the regulation of pesticides was done by USDA. It was a very different system from today. The current registration process goes back to 1972. In 1988 amendments to FIFRA were passed by Congress which required that all pre-1984 pesticides be reregistered and evaluated over a wide range of environmental effects. Since 1988 the public and regulatory scrutiny of pesticides has focused more on dietary exposure as regulated under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA ) which sets and enforces the levels of pesticide residues in food. A 1987 NAS study focused on the Delaney clause which prohibited the use of any food additives found to induce cancer. The controversy surrounding Alar, shifted the focus on regulation of pesticides more tightly on dietary exposure. Passage of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) was the culmination of years of attempts to revise the Delaney Clause and is signaled a full shift to dietary exposure as the primary driver in pesticide regulation.

A primary change of FQPA was to put the agency under timelines to reassess existing tolerances on 600 active ingredients in terms of dietary risk. Additional key changes included provisions to consider common mechanisms of toxicity and cumulative effects. This put the agency into the position of conducting cumulative analyses that were never done before. Even so, the agency would have basically been in a similar position even if FQPA would not have passed. Given the need to complete review of the broad spectrum pesticides under re-registration. However the law did change the pace and the pressure on agriculture since under the FFDCA revocation of tolerances can move more rapidly. Completing its work according to the statutory deadlines requires the Agency to negotiate a very complicated set of decisions that cannot be made in any polarized situation.

How does this affect the work we are discussion here? There are three possible areas:

The agency is looking cumulatively at crop/pest/chemical combinations in ways that have not been done in the past. The agency needs to consider all uses, all areas and all cropping patterns. We need to apply real information to some of these decisions.

For individual pesticide use where risks thresholds are exceeded, we may need to take mitigation options to get the possible risk down. Information that is being collected can be useful. However, what if we have done everything to mitigate risk but the risk threshold is still exceeded? How do we make decisions, whose pesticide use stays and whose use leaves? The problem is not only where the risk is: who transacts business? At a basic level, it is up to registrant to determine which pesticide uses to keep on the label. That's the wild card in the process.In reregistration more pesticides have been lost due to registrant decisions than to regulatory reasons. From the growers point of view, change in regulation s it is likely that there will be a loss of pesticide uses.

Discussion and comments from participants:

• There are a number of areas where modeling systems might be able to help: exposure; use patterns, risk mitigation options, where the alternatives are, and who loses, who wins. If ultimately the registrant makes the decisions in terms of market, where does that leave us?

• There is a lot of information on exposure estimates but nothing has changed. The question is how the agency balances 1,400 tolerance against each other. The trick is to reduce the amount of tolerances all at once. The chemical industry is not a monolith. They have the final decision and they don't have single viewpoint.

• While there are 1,400 tolerances, only a few hundred account for crop acreage in the United States. About 700 are not actively marketed. While the debate now centers on use of organophosphates and carbamates, the implications are for global systems. All tolerances are based on the old way of being set; they don't have to be that high. Nobody will defend residues. We are going to be ratcheting down tolerances. New risk considerations will force reconsideration of tolerances especially in developing countries. There are a lot of tough issues that will be triggered by EPA.

• The passage of FQPA focuses regulators on acute dietary risk. Historically, whenever an issue has come up to change focus in policy, the agency has pushed down risk in one area and increased it in other areas. In 10 crop analyses, the two most logical chemical substitutions have strong consequences.

• The EPA specifically does not look at ecological effects; in implementation more than likely the dietary risk is taken care of first before any ecological risk.

• In the end this kind of analysis would be determining where it would fit into overall picture. We can identify alternatives. We don't have a research mechanism in place to get materials or practice implementation in the field rapidly enough or widely enough. It is complicated and it takes lots of time. If we want farmers to get where they want to go, it is not a concern of available technology but a concern of organizing resources. Reflecting on the 75% IPM adoption goal, funding just didn't materialize.

• We have to look for those areas where we see promise and implement practices now. Even if we pump money into a system, is that system set up to handle that? We have a system to allocate money for IPM research and extension that presupposes IPM adoption is spread evenly over the U.S. In fact, IPM is adopted in spurts in response to problems. We need to put resources where the problems can be solved over an identifiable time horizon.

• Given political realities, what compelling evidence is there to change behavior? We lose organophosphates and switch to endocrine disrupters. Do we have the ability to model tradeoffs? Is that compelling enough? What is the analysis that is needed?

• We have to have representatives from major crops in there talking to the key members in the appropriations process. One problem is that none of us work the appropriations process. The other problem that is built in is the extent to which current land grant institutions look at funding as a zero sum game. They have been forced to spend most of their effort lobbying to protect their existing base funding.

• We put out a report that shows we have ample alternatives in ten crops. The only problem areas are crops in Michigan. Our immediate objective is to undermine the rhetoric that FQPA limits the use of emergency pesticides and will ruin the production of fruits and vegetables in the United States. After we do 10 crops, focusing on insecticide use, we'll move to herbicide and fungicides. We'll do apples, pears, peaches, grapes, spinach and potato, then calculate infant exposure from crops. There are a lot of alternatives. We have to go to work to save some rescue labels. The environmental community does not trust the EPA to keep the use of chemicals down. All IPM says is if we have to forfeit rescue treatments, forget it; we'll be naked. Biointensive IPM has the potential to break down like chemical treatments. We need to focus on all major crops and pesticides, do pre and post evaluation, and do multiattribute models. If we focus on some individual risks, we can do individual and multiple indices. The Entomological Society of America had a four-hour debate engaged on a lot of levels. There are a lot of ways in which significant public health issues can be dealt with without harm. Get brinkmanship going if there is no willingness to move forward. We have got to keep on stoking fires until it blows up.

• There is enough pressure to protect surface water that we may ban some pesticides. We have to come up with a viable solution. We should only use certain pesticides with prescription and only with farmers who sign on.

• How do we deal with registrants? From a marketing standpoint, they will not buy into it.

• They believe they can undermine the major impacts of FQPA on crops. If that means another 4-6 months of jockeying and EPA decides it has to do something, one way or another, it may shift public sentiment. I don't see anyone doing anything in the U.S. to get off the center and engage in rational debate.

• We can talk about alternatives but what we really need to know is whether they will work. There are implementation concerns. Specifically, we are concerned about the organophosphates we now use within our pest control systems. They work and they are inexpensive.