Quote: The first pesticides in the initial round of reassessments will include eight organophosphate pesticides that have tolerances on apples as well as other tree crops.
The 1996 Food Quality Protection Act:
Potential Impact on IPM Systems
Mike Willett, Technical Issues Manager
and
Wally Ewart, Vice President for Scientific Affairs
Northwest Horticultural Council
6 South 2nd Street, Suite 903
Yakima, WA USA
Presented at the 41st Annual IDFTA Conference, February 21-25, 1998, Pasco, Washington.
The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 (FQPA) was hailed as a welcome solution by many who had worked for years to remove the so-called "Delaney Clause" from the pesticide laws. In addition to the removal of the Delaney Clause, the FQPA included incentives for the registration of specific pesticides on minor crops and the establishment of minor use programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Since August 2, 1996, the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) at EPA has redirected its efforts to address the provisions of FQPA. All pesticides will now be forced to meet the new health-based standard of "a reasonable certainty of no harm." The law also authorizes EPA to focus registration efforts on safer and reduced risk pesticides as well as to evaluate how its efforts affect integrated pest management (IPM) programs.
The Northwest Horticultural Council (NHC) has been deeply involved in the debate surrounding the implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act and is seeking to minimize disruption of current tree fruit IPM systems as it is put into effect. While our organization may be well known in the Pacific Northwest, some of you who are not from this area might be asking yourself what the NHC is and who it represents. We will present a brief history of the NHC and the current scope of its responsibilities. Next, we will highlight six basic reasons for the current concern with the potential impact of the FQPA. We will also review the pesticides initially targeted for tolerance reassessment, and discuss the critical uses of those materials for tree fruit IPM in the Pacific Northwest along with alternatives currently available and those potentially in the pipeline. Finally, we will focus on what the near future may bring in terms of EPA actions and industry efforts to ensure fair implementation of FQPA.
The Northwest Horticultural Council was established in 1947 with a broad purpose of coordinating the activities of its members in handling problems common to the tree fruit industry of the Pacific Northwest (PNW). Its members are a who's who of organizations representing growers in specific production districts throughout the PNW and include the Medford Fruit Growers League, Hood River Grower-Shipper Association, Idaho Apple Commission, Oregon Bartlett Pear Commission, Washington Apple Commission, Washington State Fruit Commission, Wenatchee Valley Traffic Association and the Yakima Valley Growers-Shippers Association. The NHC also advises the Pear Bureau Northwest on issues related to risk management and agricultural chemicals. While its early efforts focused on transportation issues, the NHC currently also works on issues related to labor, international trade and agricultural chemicals. The NHC has four professional staff members. The NHC's Vice President of Scientific Affairs is playing a major role at the national level in shaping the FQPA debate regarding minor crop pesticides.
We will start with a brief overview of our reasons for concern with FQPA implementation.
Six areas of current discussion should be highlighted:
1) Reasonable certainty of no harm is the new standard; for compounds which are suspected carcinogens, the standard is a theoretical one-in-a-million increase in cancer incidences. For non-carcinogenic efforts, there is no bright line standard.
2) Risk will also be judged based on aggregate exposure which means that the chance of exposure to a pesticide through drinking water or home use must be factored into the equation. For some existing pesticides, this factor alone may put the risk above the allowable standard.
3) The third special issue, "cumulative exposure," is one that potentially affects many groups of pesticides. Cumulative exposure risk is based on the assumption that consumption of food treated with a number of different pesticides which have a similar mechanism of action is like consuming food treated with larger amounts of a single pesticide and residues of all the materials must be added to truly judge risk.
EPA was recently given the results of a scientific review concerning whether or not the cumulative exposure process should be used for organophosphates (OP) pesticides. The conclusion of these studies was that there is no evidence that allows the OPs to be separated by different mechanisms of action.
4) FQPA is focused on protecting the health of infants and children. The law requires that up to an additional ten-fold safety factor be applied where appropriate. For foods that are more common in the diets of infants and children such as apple juice, raisins or peaches, this factor can be the barrier to a pesticide being able to meet the safety standard.
5) One important area of risk assessment yet to be implemented is endocrine disrupter screening and testing. Although there is little agreement on the final outcome of this discussion, this decision may have even more impact than the cancer risk assessments of the old law under the Delaney Clause.
6) Any pesticides authorized under FQPA Section 18 emergency registration provision will be required to have tolerances in place at the time the Section 18 is granted. This requirement has prompted EPA to suggest that extensive reviews must be done for each Section 18 now that time limited tolerances are being set. The Section 18 process will continue to be a very important option for crops such as tree fruits. However, the overall effect of the FQPA points toward a rapid increase in Section 18 requests in order for growers to have alternatives to the pesticides that are expected to be canceled. If EPA continues to use its existing full tolerance assessment process on Section 18s, resources that should be used in the registration of new materials will be unavailable.
Tolerances issued must meet the "reasonable certainty of no harm" standard. Since scientists are not in agreement on some of these issues, we will continue to see EPA use very conservative assumptions in assessing total risk. These conservative assumptions will lead to use pattern restrictions or outright cancellation of many pesticides commonly used on minor crops. The tolerance assessment process requires that all existing tolerances will be reassessed over the next 10 years. The schedule is being described as a worst first list. This is indeed a dubious honor for those pesticides selected for immediate review.
The tolerance reassessment schedule indicates that organophosphate, carbamate and B-2 carcinogens will be included in the first set (due for completion by August 1999). The first pesticides in this initial round of reassessments will include eight organophosphate pesticides that have tolerances on apples as well as other tree crops. These are azinphosmethyl (Guthion), chlorpyrifos (Lorsban), diazinon, dimethoate, malathion, methidathion (Supracide), methyl parathion (Penncap-M) and Imidan. The OPs (and carbamates after them) are headed to a review based on aggregate risk from which it is thought that very few uses will be retained. Since the first reviews are being done before cumulative effect and endocrine effect methodologies have been finalized, pesticides may be reviewed more than once during the first 3 years. In view of this situation, it is very important that growers not think that a pesticide is free and clear once the first review is completed. If I were a fruit grower, I would be looking to a future where OP and carbamate uses are rare.
Assuming that this is the correct scenario, the NHC has recently gone through an exercise to identify current OP use patterns in apples, pears and cherries to pinpoint the critical pest management gaps should OPs be lost. Today, for the sake of time, we will limit discussion to apples. Based on our analysis, aided by members of our industry and the regional agricultural scientific community, the critical uses of OPs in the Pacific Northwest are for the management of codling moth, leafrollers, San Jose scale, woolly apple aphid, grape mealybug, cutworms and the need to retain multiple alternatives for the purposes of resistance management.
First let's look briefly at the currently registered alternatives to the OPs.
Adequate codling moth control is a concern, particularly in areas of moderate to heavy codling moth pressure. In these areas, the only currently registered alternative, mating disruption (MD), usually needs to be supplemented. The perhaps soon-to-be-registered insect growth regulators (IGRs) do not provide the quick kill of codling moth as do the customarily used OPs.
Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a weaker alternative to OPs used for leafroller control. It requires greater numbers of applications to suppress populations and will also not provide a quick knockdown if rescue treatments are required. Spinosad and a number of products falling into the insect growth regulator class of insecticides have been touted to provide effective control of leafrollers, however they are not yet registered. Mating disruption provides promise for control of leafrollers but extensive commercial testing still remains to be done to determine how MD will be integrated with other leafroller control programs.
San Jose scale control would also become more difficult. While oil will provide suppression of scale during the pre-bloom period, there are currently no widely proven alternatives for summer control of the larvae (crawlers). There has been limited testing of the IGRs for scale control.
Resistance management may also be challenged. Loss of the OPs will increase reliance on a few pesticides which will likely have to be used more often, particularly for control of aphids, grape mealybug and the more sporadic pests such as cutworm and loopers where there are limited currently registered alternatives and no clear alternatives in the pipeline. This reliance on a few compounds will speed the development of resistance to those materials.
Certain questions arise when discussing the impacts of FQPA and the first usually concerns the ability of our competitors to use these compounds on fruit exported to the U.S. While FQPA does not control the ability of foreign growers to use these products, the fruit must meet our country's maximum residue level standards when it arrives here. Also, this new law provides for significant civil penalties if illegal pesticide residues are detected on any product. However, legal action will be taken only against the individual and/or firm which places the product into interstate commerce. This may or may not be the grower. Packers and processors may become even more vigilant and require greater documentation of pesticide use practices in the future. Finally, while tolerance reassessment is scheduled to be completed by August 1999 for OPs, carbamates and B-2 carcinogens, look for these deadlines to slip for the latter two categories. OP tolerance reassessment will fill EPA's plate for most of the rest of the decade.
The exact date on which EPA will announce its implementation plan for tolerance reassessment of the OP compounds is unknown but likely will be within the next month. Once that occurs, this subject will assume even greater urgency. During the intervening period, tree fruit producers across the country should continue to identify critical uses which will be most affected by the possible loss of currently registered OPs. This information will be invaluable in communicating with EPA and the registrants to determine if and how these uses can be maintained or what alternatives may exist.
With the potential loss of specific OPs, registration of new insecticides is even more critical than in the past. EPA has set priorities for new registrations in the following descending order: methyl bromide replacements; reduced risk pesticides; USDA-EPA vulnerable crops; minor uses; non-minor use priorities; and trade irritants. Each registrant is asked to rank its top five new registrations. Although this process occurs every 6 months, the backlog at EPA means that the pipeline is clogged and very few new registrations are being completed.
The grower community needs to have effective, economic crop protection tools in place to meet pest management challenges. The implementation of FQPA has introduced a great deal of uncertainty into whether this need can be met. At this stage, it can be said that there is a pest management gap looming in the future for many minor crops. After this dire prediction, it is logical to ask what is being done to avoid possible train wrecks.
Many growers have united to work on this issue through the Minor Crop Farmer Alliance (MCFA). MCFA, among its other work, is coordinating with the National Food Processors Association, the American Crop Protection Association, major crop commodity organizations and others under an umbrella implementation working group. This group is pooling its individual talents and joint resources on FQPA implementation. Committees have been formed using the expertise of the group. Results from these committees include the writing of a Section 18 tolerance process that would minimize the level of EPA resources required while maintaining full FQPA safety standards and progress toward identifying how EPA can best use commodity and processor pesticide use and residue data in risk assessments.
This same umbrella group has initiated a major project to develop a "road map" for implementation which would identify specific concerns with currently proposed implementation plans and propose solutions which are consistent with the goals of FQPA while having the least possible impact on the ability of the agriculture industry to produce food. This "road map" should be completed within 6 to 8 weeks.
The NHC is currently working closely with the U.S. Apple Association and other industry groups to identify current OP use patterns and identify those uses where alternatives do not currently exist or, further, where there are alternatives, what the limitations of those alternatives might be. This information is being provided to EPA's Office of Pesticides Programs to aid in its risk assessment.
The bottom line is that much work remains to be done. The timetable published on tolerance reassessment appears to be unachievable. Cooperation among EPA, growers and registrants has improved immensely, but the crystal ball still looks very gray and ominous. Each commodity needs to protect its interests by working with others who are committed to improve the implementation process under FQPA. Those commodities which do not add their support to joint efforts may wake up some day without the pest management tools to adequately protect their crops and livelihood.