Pesticides

Pesticide industry and critics meet to draw up safety guideline

The U.S. pesticide industry usually encounters its critics in the courtroom or at tense annual shareholder meetings. But recently, the industry and its adversaries established a new working group to discuss the problems of pesticide abuse in the Third World and to try to institute some safeguards.

"This is the first time that environmental and agricultural chemical groups have met face to face to deal with the pesticide issue," says Karim Ahmed, a scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The new organization, called the Agricultural Chemicals Dialogue Group, came together in May and is comprised of the leaders of the industry and some of its most vocal opponents.

Joining the Natural Resources Defense Council on the side of the critics are the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, and the United Church Boards.

Representing industry are the National Agricultural Chemicals Association, Union Carbide, and the United Agricultural Products Inc.

"Special action is needed to reduce the hazards associated with misuse of pesticides which can adversely affect human health and the environment," says the group's statement of purpose. To try to correct "this critical problem," the new group has one "central objective: the development of broad new guidelines of product stewardship."

The guidelines, which participants hope will be issued by the end of the year, will cover such issues as advertising, labelling, and packaging of pesticides. In addition, the group is hoping to issue guidelines for the appropriate use of the products, stressing the need for protective clothing, and training guidelines for the safe application of the product.

"There is a hope of getting something good" out of the group, says Ellen Silbergeld, a scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. "These (pesticide) companies could improve" their practices as a result of the group's work, Silbergeld adds.

"Its a positive step," agrees Stacey J. Mobley, who represents the DuPont company within the National Agricultural Chemicals Association. "At the very least, we can become more familiar with their concerns, and they with ours."

Neither the companies, nor their associations, would comment as to why they agreed to take the unusual step of sitting down with their critics. But Ahmed of the Natural Resources Defense Council suggests that the actions of industry critics have been the chief motivating force. "There is more adverse publicity on their business practices than they have ever seen before," says Ahmed. "They don't want to become another Nestle, a focus of citizen action" against them.

Velsicol sued for $2.5 billion over toxic dump

Velsicol Chemical Corporation, one of the leading pesticide manufacturers in the United States, was brought to court in June on charges of gross negligence for its handling of its chemical waste dump in a rural Tennessee community from 1964-1973.

Residents of an area 70 miles from Memphis have filed a 2.5 billion class action suit against the company. Some of the 280 plaintiffs suffer from liver disorders and a rare form of cancer.

The case involves leakage of carcinogenic chemicals from a dump Velsicol built in 1964 to store chemical wastes from its Memphis pesticide plant. The 24-acre dump sits directly over a local aquifer. Velsicol dumped approximately 300,000 barrels of toxic wastes at the site from 1964-1973, says Sidney Gilreath, the lead trial counsel for the plaintiffs.

In 1978, residents of the local community began to complain that the water from their wells smelled and tasted bad. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) came in to do water quality tests and found the water to be contaminated with a host of toxic chemicals, many of them carcinogenic: carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, toluene, benzene and endrin.

Velsicol "didn't do any tests of any kind" to determine the potential effects of the dump, says Gilreath. In addition, Gilreath says, company documents reveal that Velsicol knew dumping the chemicals was a more hazardous method of disposal than incineration, but chose dumping because it was cheaper. "They made a strictly economic decision" says Jeff Garrety, another trial counsel for the plaintiffs.

Velsicol's public relations officer, Richard Blewitt, says Velsicol "broke no laws," and insists that dumping was generally considered at that time to be "the best way to proceed with chemical waste disposal."

When asked whether the low cost of dumping relative to incinerating influenced Velsicol's decision to dump chemicals, Blewitt answered: "Absolutely not." But then he revised his statement: "Well, let me withdraw that; I can't speak for people in 1964, but I don't think that was the major factor."

In hindsight, Blewitt says, Velsicol "would certainly follow a different procedure," but he emphasized that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency did not exist when the company first opened the dump, and that no legal standards were on the books. "What we're talking about here is not lawbreaking," says Velsicol's Blewitt. "What we're seeing is a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking."

Two of the plaintiffs in the case, who lived within a three-mile radius of the dump, have developed renal-cell cancer, an extremely rare form of cancer, which typically strikes only one in a million people.

- Melinda Nielsen

Chevron opposes use of its pesticide; Florida to bomb marijuana with paraquat

Florida officials announced in mid-July that they intended to spray large plots of marijuana plants in the state with the highly toxic herbicide, paraquat. Ironically, this proposal has brought sharp criticism from the pesticide manufacturer, the Chevron Chemical Corporation, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of California.

Paraquat, when ingested, causes fibrosis, a condition in which the lungs gradually fill up with tissue. "It's known that paraquat causes irreversible lung damage," says Jim Roelofs, public relations officer for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

"We plan to spray," says John Sullivan, an official of Florida's state law enforcement division, "as soon as we find a field that we feel is suitable."

Chevron, meanwhile, strenuously objects to the scheduled spraying. "Terrifying people in order to change their social behavior is not a registered use of the product," says company spokesperson Michael Marcy.

Fear of being sued is "one of our considerations," admits Chevron's Macy, but he adds that the most important reason the company opposes Florida's move is that spraying marijuana "is not an appropriate use of paraquat." Marcy says that Chevron sent a memo to the Justice Department in March explaining that paraquat was only to be used in crop and weed control and that the company had developed no data on the use of paraquat on marijuana.

"What they're trying to do is to avoid liability," says Roelofs of the EPA, commenting on Chevron's position. For its part, the EPA is not intervening to block the planned spraying. "The EPA position is that paraquat is registered for use on broad-leaf weeds, which marijuana is," says Roelofs, "so it's legal."

- Melinda Nielsen