Farm Bureau Demands Proper Implementation of Food Safety Law

PARK RIDGE, Ill., May 22, 1998 – The American Farm Bureau Federation, calling for "open and proper implementation" of the nation's food safety law, today requested the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency to comply with the mandates of the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 (FQPA).

In a formal petition to the two federal agencies, AFBF stated that farmers would be "adversely affected by failure on the part of EPA and USDA to establish rules to properly implement the FQPA."

"Such a failure would lead to the removal of safe and effective (crop protection) products from the market, resulting in unreasonable and unnecessary harm to farm productivity," AFBF's petition stated. "This, in turn, could increase the cost and decrease the quality and availability of American food commodities."

The implementation of FQPA "will have a profound impact on the way that pesticide use is regulated in the United States," the petition stated. By considering factors such as cumulative risk and aggregate exposure, the law will require agencies to develop new approaches to those matters and, in some cases, new technical and scientific information. Agencies also will be required to clarify the ability of existing regulations to appropriately apply a new ten-fold safety factor to protect infants and children.

"EPA has adopted an implementation strategy that relies on ad hoc and informal policies and procedures to address many issues," AFBF stated. "With respect to other key issues that arise under the FQPA, the agency has yet to provide any meaningful guidance at all. Even when policies and procedures are being used...to make important regulatory decisions, they have not been formally adopted and continue to change on an ad hoc basis."

As a result, EPA's ad hoc approach has created "enormous uncertainty and caused a great deal of unnecessary concern in the food and agricultural industries." Of particular concern is that EPA implement the ten-fold safety factor as mandated by the law. In the petition, AFBF contended the agency's current approach creates a legal and practical 'Catch 22.' Reliable information is required to assess the need for an additional safety factor to protect infants and children, yet EPA has failed to update the data requirements or clearly identify the data that may be needed to decide whether an additional safety factor is warranted.

"In providing for special consideration of infants and children, Congress plainly did not intend for EPA to sit on its hands and allow the ten-fold factor to apply by default as a result of agency inaction," the petition stated. "The FQPA instructs EPA to identify information, provide a mechanism for obtaining additional information, and provide a reasonable amount of time for information to be gathered to support informed decisions based on sound science."

Farmers are faced with uncertainty as they "try to plan for the future without being able to anticipate whether important pesticide products will be available for specific crops," the petition stated. "The FQPA implementation process would be much smoother for both EPA and the regulated community if the agency were to initiate a public rulemaking to develop regulations."

The petition requests that EPA, in consultation with USDA, initiate notice and comment rulemaking to implement key FQPA provisions. This includes regulations that specify the procedures, policies and assumptions that EPA will use to determine levels of aggregate exposure, cumulative risks and when to apply the additional ten-fold safety factor for infants and children.

AFBF stated that although it appears some EPA documents already have been used "to make important regulatory decisions about specific products" under FQPA, those documents "have not been developed through notice-and-comment rulemaking, as required" by law and some "clearly overstate actual exposure."

"The agency has not articulated the factual basis or scientific rationale supporting these assumptions or provided the public with the opportunity to critique them," the petition stated. "Although the documents indicate that conservative assumptions can be overcome by actual data, the agency has not provided any guidance on the conditions under which such data are required or the acceptable protocols for obtaining such data."

AFBF was joined on the petition by the American Crop Protection Association, the National Food Processors Association and other agricultural groups.

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