“For years, E.W.G. and other public health advocates have warned about the serious risks the weedkiller poses to farmworkers, pregnant people and other vulnerable populations,” she said.
She pointed to the Environmental Protection Agency’s own statements reaching back to the 1990s on the pesticide’s health risks, based on studies submitted by its manufacturer. A 2019 study led by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health found that more than half of adolescent women from farmworker communities in the Salinas Valley of California had been exposed to DCPA.
Some farms have voiced opposition to banning the pesticide. It was “an essential tool for controlling yield-robbing grasses and broadleaf weeds,” a representative of Griffin Ranches, which grows onions, broccoli and cauliflower in Yuma, Ariz., wrote in a 2022 letter opposing any move toward a ban.
In many cases, “the alternative would be hand-weeding, which would entail bringing on additional labor,” he wrote. Preserving the use of the product “will maintain the positive economic impact it has had on America’s vegetable growers and will ensure the continued supply of affordable and healthy vegetables for American consumers.”
The Environmental Protection Agency said it would soon issue a notice of intent to cancel DCPA products permanently, a process that could take several months if uncontested by the manufacturer, or years if the move is contested.
In the interim, the agency invoked its authority under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act to simultaneously suspend the pesticide as an emergency measure, it said, because it had determined that the continued sale and use during the time it would take to follow a normal cancellation process posed an imminent hazard.
Kaynak: briturkish.com
