Fluoridated tap water isn’t the only poison the EPA is being sued for. The EPA registered Dicamba based pesticide under the brand Xtendimax™ in 2016 for over the top use on GM cotton and soybean crops with restrictions on aircraft application and any other spraying implement other than approved nozzles at specified pressures with buffer zones between the target GM crops and the wind. In theory, these restrictions were supposed to reduce or prevent pesticide drift onto adjacent non-GM fields or ecosystems. According to the EPA press release of the time, the need for Dicamba based pesticides arose from the very predictable predicament of natural selection winning yet another arms race against corporate science as new generations of weeds become increasingly resistant to glyphosate based herbicides usually sprayed as the RoundUp formula.
It appears that Dicamba based pesticides are even more toxic than the glyphosate ones they replaced or any some instance were combined with, because the following year, after the EPA approved it for over the top use, state pesticide control officials throughout the country were inundated with over 2,600 injury claims linked to the new pesticide, a higher caseload than most state regulators were staffed to handle and that was just the tip of the iceberg.
"We are kind of getting the idea that one out of 10 farmers affected are actually filing complaints with our office," noted Carrie Leach, quality assurance director for the Office of Indiana State Chemist, which is working on 126 dicamba investigations.
A systematic review of unintentional pesticide poisoning studies conducted around the world (n = 157) and the WHO mortality database, published in BioMed Central Journal, found that there are over 77,000 unintentional pesticide poisonings in the U.S. annually. How many of these are attributable to Dicamba or Dicamba in combination with co-formulants and other pesticides is not known.
In 2018, the EPA extended registration for Dicamba for over the top use an additional 2 years despite the carnage from the previous year. In 2019 they registered another dicamba formulation pesticide. In 2020, the year these Dicamba registrations were set to expire, a coalition of grassroot nonprofits filed suit against the EPA, specifically the office of pesticides, and Bayer Cropsciences contending that the registration and extended registration of Dicamba based pesticides for over the top use on GM cotton and soybean violated the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. That approval had led to an 8-12x increase in the quantity of Dicamba used across the U.S. The main plaintiff, the National Family Farm Coalition, had filed two prior cases in 2017 and 2019. In 2020, the 9th circuit appellate court vacated the registrations and ruled that the EPA had violated the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act by underestimating the risks and costs of authorizing this much of an increase in Dicamba spraying including economic losses to conventional crop fields adjacent to areas where Dicamba was sprayed due to off field drifting. The current case comes as a result of the EPA pesticide office approving new registrations for Dicamba formulations a few months after the 9th Circuit had vacated the previous registrations. Despite acknowledging the unprecedented carnage to both human health, adjacent farms and surrounding ecosystems in 29 out of 34 states where Dicamba was employed during the 2021 growing season, the EPA only amended the registrations with additional restrictions in Iowa and Minnesota the following year and Indiana, Illinois and South Dakota the year after while declining calls to cancel the registrations. And despite acknowledging potential violations of the Endangered Species Act in 63 counties where Dicamba is sprayed in the same 2021 report in which they stated that they are ‘no longer certain whether over-the-top dicamba can be used in a manner that is protective of listed endangered species, critical habitats and non-target plants’ they failed to prohibit over the top spraying and only amended registrations to apply a cut off date and cut off temperature for spraying of 85 degrees in Minnesota and Iowa; only 2 states out of the 34 where they authorized over the top Dicamba spraying. 8 years of complicity and negligence has led the US District Court for the District of Arizona to overrule the EPA and revoke registrations for over the top spraying of Dicamba.
It should be noted that this doesn’t just pose a hazard to farm workers, adjacent crop fields of both conventional and GM crops not engineered to be resistant to Dicamba, and surrounding ecosystems. There are over 4,000 elementary schools near crop fields that could be susceptible to widespread use of this highly volatile pesticide.