Congress, the White House and federal agencies all leak scraps of information. Reporters and lobbyists wheel after them like hungry seagulls.

Many leaks are of little consequence. But when a seven-page memo slipped from the Environmental Protection Agency in February 1998, it carried the interlocking fates of America's farmers and an $11 billion pesticide industry.
 
Part I: How politics shaped pesticide law
Part II: Weighing the risks of Guthion
Part III:  The history behind the pesticide law
Part IV: Why farmers favor Guthion

[ MEMORIAL TO VICTIMS ]

Subject:   A Civics Lesson on Insecticide Poison "Regulation"----
 Date:        Tue, 07 Dec 1999 17:17:55 -0500
From:     Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization:     Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To:     Lyndon Hawkins <hawkins@empm.cdpr.ca.gov>

Lyndon, I thought you might like to read:  "How a bill becomes a very different law -- Lobbyists' actions in the wake of a leak by the Environmental Protection Agency illustrate a civics lesson on insecticide regulation - Thursday, December 2, 1999 - By Brent Walth and Alex Pulaski of The Oregonian staff.

In the world of Washington, D.C., nothing is less surprising than a leak.

Congress, the White House and federal agencies all leak scraps of information. Reporters and lobbyists wheel after them like hungry seagulls.

Many leaks are of little consequence. But when a seven-page memo slipped from the Environmental Protection Agency in February 1998, it carried the interlocking fates of America's farmers and an $11 billion pesticide industry.

The internal EPA memo described how protecting children under a new law, the Food Quality Protection Act, might mean ending or cutting the use of potent pesticides called organophosphates. Among them was Guthion, the bug-killer that growers use most often on Northwest apples.

The leak, as leaks are supposed to do, became the lever for change. Pesticide companies and agricultural groups knew how to wield it.

When they did, they opened a political fissure that widened until it reached the vice president of the United States -- and permanently altered the whole course of the law.

Lynn Goldman had already been part of one political miracle: She had helped pass a Democratic administration's bill intended to keep children safe from pesticides. And she had done it in a Republican Congress known for its anti-environmental legislation.

Now she needed a second miracle. She needed to make the law work.

Then 45, Goldman had never planned to traverse the corridors of Capitol Hill. A pediatrician by training, she had spent her career investigating environmental cases, especially those involving pesticides. Raised in Texas, she had watched her father -- also a pediatrician with a crusader's streak -- track illnesses tied to farm chemicals.

She achieved national prominence working for the California Department of Health Services from 1985 to 1993, conducting investigations that linked the illnesses of West Coast workers to uses of the soil fumigant methyl bromide and the insecticide aldicarb.  Her leadership of California's office that tries to prevent environmental health problems gained the Clinton administration's notice. In September 1993, EPA chief Carol Browner named Goldman as assistant administrator for pesticides and toxic substances.

Despite years of state government experience, Goldman was surprised by the realities of her new job. Day after day, her waiting room and message pad filled up with chemical company lobbyists all expecting to meet and greet the new administrator.

After a while, she wondered: Why weren't environmental and consumer groups also calling? They were, her staff answered, but they were being routinely shunted to less powerful staff offices across the river in Virginia.

"That's just the way things had always been done," Goldman said.

She also learned that when either environmental groups or industry lobbyists really wanted things done at the EPA, their first stop wasn't within the agency at all. Instead, they went right to a friendly member of Congress, who would then apply pressure in the right places.

Goldman had hoped the new law would allow her agency to make decisions based on science, not politics.

But the law she had helped forge entered a vacuum: Congress had passed the bill so quickly in July 1996 that farmers, pesticide companies, environmental groups -- even the legislators who voted for it, and many inside the EPA itself -- had little or no idea what was in it or how to carry it out.

What's more, once they learned about the new law, some people inside the agency itself dug in their heels.

Bill passes unexpectedly
Daniel J. Barolo awakened one morning in late July 1996, opened The Washington Post and got the first official word that his world was about to be turned upside down.

No one had really expected the most sweeping change in pesticide law in four decades to actually pass Congress.

"To say we were surprised to learn about this is putting it mildly," Barolo said.

Now, as Goldman celebrated, Barolo worried. As director of the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs, he headed the 800-person division that would have to enforce the law. Overnight, virtually everything the agency knew about policing pesticides had changed:

• First, farmers could no longer argue, as they could in the past, that the economic harm of banning a pesticide outweighed the health benefits. Under the new law, if a pesticide proved too risky -- especially to kids -- it had to go, regardless of the cost to farmers.
• Second, the agency was now required to add an extra layer of protection for children in its calculations. The new layer assumed that children could safely withstand only one-tenth the pesticide exposure that adults could.

The only way to avoid the onerous tenfold reduction would be to prove there was no danger to children.

It was as if courtroom rules had suddenly shifted so that defense attorneys had to prove their clients' innocence.

• Most important, the law required that the EPA weigh the dangers of all pesticides together in the American diet. The agency could no longer regulate one pesticide at a time if scientists believed whole classes, such as organophosphates, worked in the same way.

That meant that the EPA would have to treat the Guthion that growers spray on apples and the diazinon in your garden bug killer and the Dursban on your dog's flea collar as a single threat to kids.

Barolo was stunned that Congress expected his agency to respond right away. What should have taken years to adjust to had been compressed to an instant.

No grace period to collect data. No time to set policies. No time to hire new staff. No time to write new rules.

No one knew exactly where to begin.

"It was an incredibly frustrating time," Barolo said.

Clashing views bring gridlock Meanwhile, others inside the EPA were offended by the new law's implications. Susan Makris, a toxicologist, shared others' feelings that the agency had been doing everything it could to protect children all along.

"Many people at EPA were just aghast: 'Who are these guys to tell us to do this?' " she said, adding that many were cynical about lawmakers' motives. "So what we had was Congress seeing it as a great way to cement the next election, and suddenly we had this law. . . . It was felt there wasn't a lot of scientific basis for it."

But not everyone agreed with that view. "Many scientists at EPA told me they didn't think the act was necessary," said Goldman, the agency's assistant administrator. "But there were plenty of others who said they had been trying to change this for years." The clashing viewpoints within the EPA brought gridlock.

Within two months of the law's passage, Barolo's office patched together a plan for carrying out the law. The policy paper, however, called many of the new law's requirements "unwarranted." For example, the agency decided that the tenfold extra protection for children would not be applied across the board, as the law required. Instead, the extra protection for children would be used "on a case-by-case basis under special circumstances."

In other words, the agency would in many ways operate just as it always had.

Extra protection not enforced
When he contacted EPA staff in the summer of 1997, David Wallinga wasn't looking to police the progress of the new law. A physician by training, he was looking into how the government tracked a wide range of health risks. So he asked the agency a simple question: Just how often did it invoke the new pesticide law to protect children?

In November 1997, a full year after the law's passage, an EPA official faxed Wallinga the answer: The agency had failed to apply the extra tenfold protection for children in 89 out of 107 cases.

Wallinga immediately realized the implication.

He worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the few environmental groups in Washington, D.C., that regularly tracked pesticide issues. The council had made news -- and earned lasting enmity from growers -- when in 1989 it drew the attention of CBS' "60 Minutes" to Alar, a growth enhancer used on apples that had been linked to cancer.

The Alar story scared consumers and cost apple growers hundreds of millions of dollars before the EPA banned the chemical in 1991.   When Wallinga shared the information on the new pesticide law, his colleagues agreed they should act.

The council went straight to the office of Rep. Henry Waxman. A California Democrat and pugnacious public-health advocate, Waxman had championed the Food Quality Protection Act and stood right behind President Clinton at the bill-signing ceremony in August 1996.

Based on Wallinga's information, Waxman fired off questions to EPA Administrator Carol Browner. Within a few days, the same information found its way into The New York Times, which published an article under the headline "Environmental Agency Under Fire on Safety Rules."

A pivotal briefing
With all the negative attention focused on the EPA, some within the agency began agitating for action.

The internal tension reached a crucial point on Feb. 5, 1998, in the pesticide office's headquarters in the Crystal City district of Arlington, Va., just across the Potomac River from Washington.

Barolo had been replaced just three months earlier by a new director, Marcia Mulkey.

Mulkey, a xx-year EPA veteran, asked her staff to brief her on the new law. They delivered their sweeping conclusion: When added together, organophosphates as currently used in the United States posed an "unacceptable" risk.

Their logic rested on a study published a month earlier by an independent scientific review organization, the International Life Sciences Institute, demonstrating that all organophosphates act on the body in a similar fashion. EPA officials had already decided to accept the conclusion as policy.

Internal EPA records show that, by April 1997, the agency had already concluded that one organophosphate, Guthion, posed a "serious risk concern" all by itself.

The agency'sconclusion was based on a worst-case estimate. But as a result, the EPA believed that, when measured together, all the 148 million pounds of organophosphates used on crops and pets, and in homes, offices and gardens, almost certainly created too many chances that children could be exposed to unhealthy doses on any given day.

Mulkey's staff offered six options. The least stringent called for putting off the sweeping review of organophosphates until later. The memo described the advantages of that tactic: "(EPA) will face least challenge" from chemical companies and growers. The "most stringent" included either banning organophosphates before the next growing season or forcing pesticide companies to justify why their products should stay on the market. The advantage of this route: It complied with the law. The downside: Growers and pesticide companies would be sure to fight.

No one at that briefing knew for sure what option to choose.

But someone inside the agency determined a course of action: leak the memo.

Massive lobbying campaign
EPA officials never learned who leaked the memo or which pesticide lobbyist got it first.

But within days of the meeting, the memo arrived by fax at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the American Crop Protection Association, representing 57 pesticide-makers. Soon, word of the memo reached the 13 companies that produce most of the world's organophosphates.

"We started hearing rumors about a plan inside EPA to cancel organophosphates," said Wayne Carlson, regulatory affairs chief at Bayer Corp., the maker of Guthion.

In response, the pesticide industry launched a massive lobbying campaign that, even by its critics' estimation, was devastatingly effective in its simplicity. It had one goal: tell Congress that if EPA was not stopped, a political price would be paid.

The companies and the American Crop Protection Association started warning their customers -- farmers and growers across America -- that if they didn't act immediately, they were going to lose the bug-killing chemicals they depended on.

Pesticide companies mobilized the big grower organizations and co-ops that represented their biggest customers. The Crop Protection Association printed at least 20,000 "Call to Action" brochures urging growers to apply "political pressure" to Congress. Industry magazines such as Western Fruit Grower reprinted the message. "The battle lines have been drawn," one campaign flyer said. "It's up to you to act."

In Washington state, the country's most abundant apple producer and the heaviest user of Guthion, growers were already struggling under the weight of three straight years of falling prices. They grew livid at the prospect of the EPA regulating them into bankruptcy court.

Doug Crow, who grows 100 acres of apples near Othello, Wash., fired off letters to his congressmen.

"I was more scared than angry or frustrated," he said. "I've felt like a lot of this stuff coming down from the EPA isn't really well thought out -- they're off in the clouds."

Farmers barraged Capitol Hill with letters.
Grower groups flew members to Washington, D.C., and the American Crop Protection Association handed out red fly swatters. Leave things to the EPA, farmers told their representatives, and these fly swatters will be all we have to fight off pests.

In turn, members of Congress began calling the agency to demand explanations. Lynn Goldman recalled a trip to Yakima during which an apple grower showed her a letter from a lobbying group in Washington, D.C., claiming that the EPA had already decided to ban organophosphates. Goldman told the growers it wasn't true.

Looking at the letter, she recognized it as identical to another one a blueberry grower in Maine had shown her a week earlier.

"It was an incredible lesson for me," Goldman said. "By the time they were done, there was already a sense at EPA that we had lost the day."

Lobbyists target congressman
The campaign waged by the pesticide companies and grower groups found a standard-bearer on Capitol Hill, Rep. Charles Stenholm of Texas, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee. Stenholm was a cotton grower who had never cared much for the way the EPA regulated pesticides. He was also a natural target for pesticide lobbyists for another reason: He was in political trouble back home.

Despite his conservative views and his raising of big money for re-election, Stenholm was seeing his margins of victory slip, even against little-known Republicans.

Stenholm had heard about the leaked memo. By his own account, he met frequently with lobbyists from the crop protection association and dozens of farming groups over their concerns about the EPA.  "We went to Charlie Stenholm because we knew he was a friend of agriculture and he could get to the vice president," said Dean Kleckner, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Vice President Al Gore oversaw environmental policy in the Clinton administration, including the EPA, and was also a big supporter of the new pesticide law.

The month before, farmers visiting Gore in the White House had already made clear to him how upset they were with the way the law was being carried out.

On Feb. 26, 1998, Stenholm went to Gore's White House office. Once the door closed behind Stenholm, Democratic Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas and a few members of their staffs, the Texas congressman got to the point.

Stenholm said that farmers were afraid, that the EPA's "arbitrary whim" would rob them of chemicals they needed to make a profit. He told the vice president that Democrats from key farming states would pay a price at the polls in November for an aggressive pesticide policy.

Stenholm also hinted that Gore's own 2000 presidential hopes in those same states would be hurt. Later, Stenholm characterized his warning to Gore this way: "I don't think anybody that has aspirations for national office wants to take credit for stopping technology in agriculture."

As he left the White House, Stenholm believed he had delivered the message that farmers and chemical companies wanted the vice president to hear.  But he had no idea what Gore would do.

You can reach Brent Walth at 503-294-5072 or by e-mail at brentwalth@aol.com. You can
reach Alex Pulaski at 503-294-5957 or by e-mail at alexpulaski@news.oregonian.com.
--
Larry Yates
Organizer
Center for Health, Environment & Justice
P.O. Box 6806
Falls Church, VA 22040
(703) 237-2249
URL: http://www.essential.org/cchw/

Well Lyndon, If you want to call protecting the children or using the Precautionary Principle or obeying the federal law "stopping technology in agriculture" - you have to be concerned more about the poison "industr" profits than you are for the people and the environment.  I believe history will show "who" stopped technology in agriculture.  Lyndon, I can control all of your agricultural pests including fire ants and "black goo" - when will you "legally" allow me to do so with my unregistered/safe/effective/GRAS alternatives?  Or will you continue to insist only "registered" organophosphates be used in California?

Respectfully,  Stephen L. Tvedten.