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AgLogic Chemical for the second time has asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to approve aldicarb, a highly toxic insecticide — this time to fight greening disease threatening Florida citrus fruits.
North Carolina-based AgLogic is the only formulator of aldicarb, a neurotoxin classified as “extremely hazardous” by the World Health Organization and banned in more than 125 countries.
The EPA and manufacturing giant Bayer agreed in 2010 to stop using aldicarb in the U.S. after the EPA found the chemical’s application on citrus plants “posed unacceptable dietary risks to infants and young children.”
In 2011, the company applied for — and received — approval for using the insecticide on cotton, dry beans, peanuts, soybeans, sugar beets and sweet potatoes.
When AgLogic received approval for using aldicarb on other crops in 2011, Karen McCormack, a retired employee of the EPA’s pesticide office, was perplexed. She told the Center for Biological Diversity in 2020 that it was “deeply disappointing” to watch the EPA renege on its agreement to ban “this highly toxic and persistent pesticide.”
After AdLogic’s request in December 2020, the EPA in January 2021 registered a new aldicarb formulation for use on oranges and grapefruit in Florida. The agency’s rationale was to “protect America’s citrus industry from citrus greening and citrus canker disease,” citing “$1.75 billion in cumulative losses in production value over a 10-year period.”
The EPA wrote:
“The registration limits the product’s sale and distribution to an amount allowing up to 100,000 acres in Florida to be treated each application season (Nov. 15-April 30) for three growing seasons, expiring on April 30, 2023. The product label also requires specific application restrictions to help protect potential runoff and leaching to drinking water sources.”
Contradicting the agency’s 2010 conclusion that aldicarb presents “unacceptable dietary risks to infants and young children,” the EPA said it completed a human health risk assessment for aldicarb and determined it “present[s] no risks of concern, including to young children.”
However, following the EPA’s approval in 2021, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services rejected its use, asserting “aldicarb poses an unacceptable risk to human, animal and environmental health.” And in response to a lawsuit filed by farmworker and conservation groups, a federal court in 2021 reversed the EPA’s approval, citing violations of the Endangered Species Act.
Now, AgLogic’s latest petition could lead to another EPA approval for use of aldicarb on citrus fruits. The EPA is accepting public comments until Aug. 23.
‘Extremely low doses’ can be ‘dangerous’ for children’s brain development
Nathan Donley, Ph.D., environmental health science director for the Center for Biological Diversity, is concerned that another battle to protect consumers and wildlife looms.
He told The Defender:
“It worries me that there [might] have been assurances that have been made. I doubt they’re going to put in an application unless they think they will have a high chance of success. I’m not sure what their calculus is here.
“This office, regardless of administration, has shown that it rarely says no. There’s no amount of restrictions, no amount of assurance that makes us think this can be used safely. EPA really has a duty here to do its due diligence before approving it.”
Last week, Donley said in a press release that this latest attempt to use aldicarb on citrus shows the pesticide industry’s “rhetoric about transitioning to safer pesticides is hypocritical and craven,” adding it’s “more interested in making a quick buck than doing the right thing.”
Donley told the Environmental Working Group “The science is clear” and “there is simply no way aldicarb can be used” without putting small children, farmworkers or wildlife at risk.
He said:
“Even extremely low doses in water or on food can have dangerous impacts on brain development in young children. In a state fully dependent on its groundwater, the last thing Floridians need is a chemical like aldicarb that is known to readily leach through soils into drinking water supplies and persist for years.”
According to aldicarb’s labeling, the chemical causes damage to the central nervous system through prolonged or repeated exposure.
A report by the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS) documented several incidents where the ingestion of contaminated food led to aldicarb poisoning, including among consumers of watermelon and cucumber in California, Oregon and Nebraska in the 1970s and 1980s.
The most severe signs and symptoms included loss of consciousness and cardiac arrhythmia. The report concluded that aldicarb is a “highly toxic pesticide” to the general population and negatively impacts the production of acetylcholinesterase (AChE), an enzyme critical to optimal nerve function.
According to the journal Pediatrics:
“Children are uniquely vulnerable to uptake and adverse effects of pesticides because of developmental, dietary, and physiologic factors.
“Unintentional ingestion by children may be at a considerably higher dose than an adult because of the greater intake of food or fluids per pound of body weight.”
A study by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, the Wisconsin Division of Health and others found that ingestion of aldicarb-contaminated groundwater adversely affects immune system function.
Aldicarb can persist in groundwater for decades due to its long half-life — between 200 to 2,000 days — according to the study.
Exposed bees exhibited ‘strange abdominal movement and spasms’
In an article for Beyond Pesticides, Nikita Naik, MPH, explained that aldicarb is categorized as a systemic pesticide, meaning it is “taken up by the vascular system of a plant” and then expressed in pollen, nectar and sap-like droplets.
Naik wrote:
“The empirical and scientific data on the adverse effects of systemic pesticides document the failure of the [EPA] to prevent the introduction and proliferation of substances that are devastating to the stability of healthy ecosystems.”
Pollinators like bees are exposed when they interface with contaminated plants. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture concluded exposure to neurotoxicants “elicits acute and sublethal reductions in honey bee fitness.”
Almost 60% of the 259 wax and 350 pollen samples studied by Penn State researchers contained at least one systemic pesticide. The researchers specifically found aldicarb in bee pollen at 1 ppm levels. The IPCS health and safety guide for aldicarb places this on the highest end of the allowable residual level of 0.002-1 mg/kg for plants and animal products in the U.S.
Another study investigated the behavioral effects on honeybees from exposure to a selection of pesticides, including aldicarb, that target nerve signaling by inhibiting AChE. The results showed that aldicarb inhibits AChE in honeybee brain and gut tissue.
Exposed bees walked less, were more likely to have difficulty righting themselves after falling over and exhibited strange abdominal movement and spasms.
Pesticide use is a ‘failed strategy’
According to the USDA, citrus greening is a disease spread by an infected Asian citrus insect.
Seeking aldicarb as a solution to citrus greening is a failed strategy, said André Leu, international director of Regeneration International, organic farming expert and author of “Growing Life: Regenerating Farming and Ranching” and “The Myth of Safe Pesticides.”
Leu, who commercially farms 30 acres of tropical fruits in Australia, told The Defender:
“The spraying of pesticides has failed. Why would spraying a banned pesticide be any better? It’s proven all around the world that the widespread spraying of pesticides [for citrus greening] has failed. What they need to do is start looking at alternatives.”
One way to do this, he explained, is to introduce host plants to the farm system to encourage the presence of the bug’s natural enemies.
“Bring in the science of agroecology, like insectaries,” Leu said. “There’s very good [research] on how to redesign the systems to bring in this ecology. We actually have good science and good practice — it’s just not been applied.”
Leu warned about the continued use of pesticides and fertilizers, saying “All organisms have immune systems. You give plants a life of junk food, you’re going to get a lot of health problems. That’s what chemical fertilizers do.”
“The key is to regenerate soil organic matter,” he said. “That becomes 90% of how to control diseases.”
