Through policy advocacy and grassroots campaigning, Center for Food Safety (CFS), Moms Across America and many other U.S. organizations are fighting back against a coordinated, industry-backed campaign threatening decades of hard-won protections from pesticide exposure through simultaneous efforts at both state and federal levels.
At the end of March, CFS submitted expert policy comments alongside over 10,000 comments from their members asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deny a rulemaking petition with disastrous implications for pesticide regulations nationwide.
CFS and other organizations are opposing these efforts to severely restrict states’ longstanding authority to implement stronger pesticide warnings than allowed for under federal standards, thereby shielding pesticide manufacturers from liability when people are harmed by their products.
“This multi-pronged attack represents one of the most serious threats to public health protections from pesticides we’ve seen in decades,” said Amy van Saun, Senior Attorney at CFS. “If successful, these efforts would not only prevent states from warning residents about pesticide dangers, but would also block victims of pesticide exposure from seeking justice.”
“Tens of thousands of mothers and supporters have been calling and emailing to stop these Make America $ick Again pesticide immunity bills. It is unconscionable that our elected officials would allow themselves to be hoodwinked into believing they are protecting farmers. The only thing they are protecting is Bayer and ChemChina’s executive’s funds for a third beach home. If Bayer truly wanted to avoid further lawsuits for toxicity from their products, one would think that rather than spending millions on lawyers and lobbyists, that they would spend that money on reformulating their products for safety,” Zen Honeycutt, the Executive Director of Moms Across America added.
The pesticide industry’s campaign is operating on two fronts:
At the state level, legislation introduced in at least ten states—including Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Georgia—would make EPA’s federal pesticide labels the sole authority on health risks. This means if a harm isn’t specifically listed on the EPA label, affected individuals would be unable to seek damages, effectively shielding manufacturers from lawsuits brought by individuals and communities harmed by their products. Such lawsuits are available for all other industries who make products that hurt people.
Simultaneously, Attorneys General from eleven states petitioned EPA to amend the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) with language that would preempt states’ ability to impose stronger pesticide warnings and protect manufacturers from liability under state consumer protection laws nationwide. The suppression of human health warnings would not only block restitution for past victims of pesticide-induced disease, CFS contends, but also result in ongoing suffering and death.
Pesticide users are far more likely to wear exposure-reducing, life-saving protective gear like rubber gloves if they are warned that a pesticide can cause cancer, but EPA’s pesticide division rarely if ever requires such warnings, even for pesticides it classifies as “likely” or “probable” human carcinogens. In other cases described in CFS comments, EPA pesticide regulators refuse to acknowledge pesticidal harms like reproductive impacts that authoritative bodies like the National Institutes of Health or even other divisions of EPA recognize. In still other instances, EPA-approved pesticides that may be safe under ideal conditions of use are harmful when mishaps like sprayer malfunctions occur, and users are exposed to excessive amounts of the pesticide.
“EPA has shown time and again it will always find a way to approve a pesticide, no matter how harmful to human health or the environment,” said Bill Freese, Science Director at CFS. “States must retain the right to protect their citizens by warning of pesticidal harms like cancer even though EPA is afraid to do so,” he added.
EPA’s bias is demonstrated by a 2022 federal court ruling that took the extraordinary step of rescinding EPA’s human health assessment of glyphosate, the herbicide implicated in causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma in successful lawsuits brought by users of glyphosate products. The court found that EPA, in denying glyphosate’s cancer threat, illegitimately dismissed a mountain of evidence showing that glyphosate causes cancer by violating its carcinogen assessment guidelines.
“Everyone deserves the right to protect themselves from dangerous pesticides,” said van Saun “We cannot allow multinational billionaire corporate interests to roll back decades of vital protections and leave Americans without recourse when harmed by these products.”
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