Court orders E.P.A to ban pesticide tied to children’s severe health problems

By Erin Elizabeth

Yesterday, a federal appeals court ordered the EPA to bar — within 60 days — a widely used pesticide that’s been associated with developmental disabilities and other health problems in children.

“The order by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit came after a decade-long effort by environmental and public health groups to get the pesticide, chlorpyrifos, removed from the market. The product is used in more than 50 fruit, nut, cereal and vegetable crops including apples, almonds, oranges and broccoli, with more than 640,000 acres treated in California alone in 2016, the most recent year data is available.

In March 2017, just a month after he was confirmed as the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt rejected a petition by the health and environmental groups to ban the pesticide. He did so even though the agency’s own staff scientists had recommended that chlorpyrifos be removed from the market, based on health studies that had suggested it was harming children, particularly among farmworker families.”

Environmentalists and public health advocates, who have been trying to get chlorpyrifos removed from the market for ten years (it was previously banned from most commercial uses in households as an insecticide, but was still legally used to combat insects on farms), celebrated the ruling.

Marisa Ordonia, a lawyer at Earthjustice, the environmental group that handled the legal work on the lawsuit said, “Finally, decades of poisonous exposures and harm to children and farmworkers will end. E.P.A.’s shameful history of putting industry cronies before the people they are supposed to protect is over.”2 And the national vice president of United Farm Workers of America’s Erik Nicholson said, “The E.P.A. has put the women and men who harvest the food we eat every day in harm’s way too long by allowing the continued use of this dangerous neurotoxin. We commend the court for doing what E.P.A. should have done years ago. The people who feed us deserve a safe and healthy workplace.”