Pesticide Use
Published by Ruby Hawk on June 3, 2008 in AlternativeArticle Tools
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The Department of Agriculture announces it will stop publishing a national survey that tracks the use of pesticides.
The United States public has relied on the Department of Agriculture’s national survey since 1990 to track pesticide use. Environmental groups use it to analyze which chemicals could turn up in local water supplies and farmers and consumers have relied on the agency’s annual report to learn which states apply the most pesticides and where they are most heavily sprayed.
We will soon be on our own because the Agriculture Department last week said it plans to stop publishing the national survey.
“If you don’t know what’s being used, then you don’t know what to look for,” said Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at the Organic Center, a nonprofit organization in Enterprise, Ore.” In the absence of information, people can be lulled into thinking that there are no problems”
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 available there’s not much we can do.” said Reilly.
“It’s probably not an area where lack of data is a good idea.” said Don Lipton, a spokesman for the American Farm Bureau. What we’ll end up doing is understanding pesticide use through getting accident reports. And that’s a lousy way to protect the public health.”
According to a letter written by an advisory committee to the agency, it would cost a farmer approximately $500,000 to buy a full set of the privately collected data each year, and neither farmers nor consumers can afford that. Given the increasing concern by consumers, farmers, regulators, and activist groups, stopping the survey at this time seems to be a very bad idea.
11 Comments
Very informative and worrisome.
Oh dear! This is not good news! Just hope that the crop producers will be less liberal using pesticide!
Great article. Here in Ontario they are phasing out chemical pesticide and will use organic only starting in 2009. Like Rachel said, I hope the farmers will decide the effects of chemicals in our food is worth changing how they operate.
Scary stuff. Nice article as always!
bad news for farmers,
wow. this is a bit disturbing. how can we begin to know what is safe without tracking these chemicals?
Worrying.
Thank you friends for your interest. It will put us even more in the dark losing this report. It is a sad state of affairs when we can’t afford a report of the poisons allowed in our food. It’s a
sadder state that we have poison in our food.
This is sad news!
Who cares?
I don’t know how they can do that but they will. We are the losers.