Consumers lost a key source of information about what's sprayed on their food yesterday, the last day the government published a long-standing national survey that tracks the amount of pesticides used on everything from corn to apples.
Despite opposition from prominent scientists, the nation's largest farming organizations and environmental groups, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed yesterday that it plans to do away with the program.
Since 1990, farmers and consumer advocates have relied on the agency's detailed annual report to learn which states apply the most pesticides and where bug and weed killers are most heavily sprayed to help cotton, grapes and oranges grow.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also uses the fine-grained data when figuring out how chemicals should be regulated, and which pesticides pose the greatest risk to public health.
“In the absence of information, people can be lulled into thinking that there are no problems with the use of pesticides on food in this country,” said Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at The Organic Center, a nonprofit in Enterprise, Ore.
Joe Reilly, an acting administrator at the National Agricultural Statistics Service, said the program was cut because the agency could no longer afford to spend the $8 million the survey sapped from its $160 million annual budget.
“Unless new funds are made available there's not much that we can do,” said Reilly, adding that consumers could find similar data from private sources.
Still, only a handful of the major agricultural chemical companies spend the approximately $500,000 it costs to buy a full set of the privately collected data each year, according to a letter written by an advisory committee to the agency. Most farmers can't afford to pay for the information, even if they need it to plan for the pesticides they'll apply.
Environmental groups use the program to analyze which chemicals could turn up in local water supplies or endanger critical species.
In 2003, the Natural Resources Defense Council used the federal survey to prepare a suit against the EPA, claiming the government failed to assess whether the common herbicide atrazine threatened the survival of endangered Chesapeake Bay sea turtles, endangered Texas salamanders and 16 other aquatic species. The case was settled in 2006.
