To the editor:
Farmers, consumers and state regulators are wondering what's going on at the Environmental Protection Agency. Why has it scheduled a series of hastily convened meetings to re-examine the valuable herbicide atrazine so soon after a similar review confirmed it is safe to use?
Will those meetings deprive farmers of an essential tool that can mean the difference between turning a profit and going broke?
Little known outside of agriculture, atrazine is crucial to growing corn and other crops vital to farmers. The EPA itself estimates that atrazine saves farm families $2 billion a year. In use for more than half-a-century, every regulatory review of the science around atrazine has found it can be used safely. EPA has some 6,000 studies on atrazine in its files, making it, in all probability, the most heavily scrutinized crop protection product in history."
Why, then, the redo?
The EPA admits it has taken its action in response to the screams of strident environmentalist groups. A recent example was a report by the Pesticide Action Network North America and Land Stewardship Project - a report that was riddled with factual inaccuracies and half-truths. The science itself, however, tells a very different story.
Over the past 22 years, the EPA has conducted almost continuous reviews of atrazine, and each of them has come to the same conclusion - atrazine can be used safely. Atrazine has been given positive reviews jointly by the World Health Organization and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and by several countries including Australia and the United Kingdom.
The bulging file of studies giving atrazine a thumbs-up got even thicker this month. The latest study is a review conducted by the State of Minnesota. As the Minnesota Department of Agriculture states, their review found "that atrazine regulations protect human health and the environment in Minnesota."
Atrazine levels in drinking water systems, even in agricultural areas, have already been found to be well within the safety zone of 3 parts per billion. Let's put it this way: A 150-pound adult could drink thousands of gallons of water containing that amount of atrazine every day for 70 years and still not reach levels shown to still have no effect in lab studies.
Yet despite atrazine's passing all of these tests with flying colors, the EPA is rushing through yet another re-evaluation, and if the activists' calls to limit the herbicide win out, farmers throughout the Midwest will be the first ones to suffer the consequences.
According to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, atrazine is key to profitable farming in this state. University of Minnesota weed scientists are quoted in the review as saying "there are no direct replacements for atrazine in preemergent weed control that are currently registered for use in Minnesota." The EPA has found that atrazine saves corn farmers as much as $28 per acre in reduced costs and increased yields.
That also means that any action to limit farmers' access to atrazine will hurt consumers.
After all, corn is used in a lot of products that can be found on the average family's dinner table, providing the feed for most livestock. Without atrazine holding farmers' costs down, consumers can expect the price of beef, chicken, pork, eggs, milk and cereal to go up.
Add to that the cost of all sugar products, because without atrazine, sugar cane growers would lose 10 percent to 40 percent of their crop. The result? An increase in the cost of food at a time American consumers can least afford it. A leap in costs for farmers when many are struggling to survive.
We depend on the EPA to do its job. But it must do so based on established scientific principles, not in response to special interest groups who make lots of noise but offer little in the way of accurate facts. Farmers throughout the Midwest know that atrazine is a safe and essential tool - one that benefits them, their communities, and their customers.
Tim Dritz, Vice President of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association
Hendricks