By Peter Montague
The US food industry went ballistic in January when Food & Water, Inc, a grassroots advocacy group in Walden, Vermont, and Environmental Research Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland, published an ad in Supermarket News comparing pesticide deaths to deaths by assault rifles, concluding, "More people are killed by their salad".
For the past five years, the food industry — especially the produce industry (fruits and vegetables) — has been developing a campaign called "five a day". They want everyone to eat five helpings of fruits and vegetables each day. This is a multimillion-dollar campaign. The food corporations are banking on this campaign to provide greatly increased profits for agrochemical food growers.
That's why they went nuts when Food & Water struck their Achilles heel, which is the fact that most of the fruits and vegetables in US supermarkets today contain pesticide residues that can cause disease. This a dirty little secret that the food industry doesn't want anyone talking about.
'Food disparagement'
In fact, agribusiness corporations are so eager to close off discussion of toxic pesticide residues in food that the industry has been campaigning state by state in recent years to pass "food disparagement" laws making it a crime to criticise agricultural products without "a sound scientific basis".
Such "banana laws", as they are called, are now on the books in 11 states, and they are under consideration in 10 more. Further, the food industry is trying to stick a "food disparagement" provision into the 1996 Farm Bill.
It seems clear that these laws will be declared unconstitutional when they are challenged in court, but it will be a long, expensive fight — probably costing upwards of US$500,000 to litigate. As a result, such laws will very likely have a chilling effect on journalists and others who might be inclined to discuss the possibility that pesticide-laced foods aren't as healthy for you as fruits and vegetables that are free of poisonous residues.
In Florida, anyone found guilty of "agricultural disparagement" must pay a fine equal to three times the estimated dollar amount of damage done to agribusiness plaintiffs. The Georgia statute defines disparagement as "the wilful or malicious dissemination to the public in any manner of false information that a perishable food product or commodity is not safe for human consumption" and defines false information as "not based on reasonable and reliable scientific inquiry, facts, or data".
It's anybody's guess what "reasonable" and "reliable" mean. We can recall a time when "reasonable" and "reliable" data showed that diethylstilbestrol (DES) and DDT were both "safe" for humans and the environment. Unfortunately, those reasonable and reliable data were quite wrong.
Denials
The food industry flatly denies that anyone has ever been harmed by the roughly 270 million kilograms of toxic chemicals that have been intentionally sprayed on the nation's food and fibre crops each year for the past 50 years. Bob Carey, president of the Produce Marketing Association in Newark, Delaware, told Supermarket News that he was "dismayed and appalled" by the Food & Water advertisement which said thousands of Americans are killed each year by pesticide residues.
"No one ... has ever been harmed by eating fresh produce properly treated with crop protection tools", Carey told the News. He told the Packer, "Produce on store shelves and on restaurant plates is safe".
Tom Stenzel, president of the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, called the statements in the ad "pure fabrication". David Moore, president of the Western Growers Association, said that comparing the hazards of fresh produce to assault weapons was "tantamount to yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre".
Falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre has been used by the US Supreme Court as a legal test for determining when society has the right to limit a person's constitutional right of free speech.
But suppose it is true that pesticides kill more people than assault rifles do each year. Then Carey, Stenzel and Moore are making false statements that would tend to harm people by inducing them to consume toxic chemicals.
So who's right? Unfortunately, good data are scarce. The only book-length study of pesticide hazards was published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1987. The NAS reported in 1987 that it could find "very limited actual data" regarding pesticide residues on food. David Pimental at Cornell University pointed out in 1993, "U.S. analytical methods now employed detect only about one-third of the more than 600 pesticides in use".
So estimates must be substituted for real data. Fifty years into pesticide technology, this lack of data is shocking and pathetic. (Who benefits from the absence of such data?)
1987 study
The NAS study restricted itself to pesticides in and on food. It omitted pesticide exposures that occur as a result of drinking pesticide-contaminated ground water, a phenomenon that is very common in parts of the US.
Pesticides come in three flavours: herbicides, insecticides and fungicides.
According to the NAS, about 220 million kg of herbicides are used annually in the US; of these, 135 million kg are agents that "the EPA [US Environmental Protection Agency] presumes to be oncogenic or for which positive oncogenicity data are currently under review by the agency". Oncogenic means tumour-producing. The NAS estimate omitted two large-volume herbicides, atrazine and 2,4-D, because EPA received data indicating oncogenicity of these chemicals after the NAS study was completed.
Quantities of oncogenic insecticides are not described in detail in the NAS study. Insecticides are described in terms of acre treatments; one acre-treatment is defined as one acre to which one pesticide has been applied one time. NAS says that presumed oncogens make up between 35% and 50% of all insecticidal acre-treatments.
About 90% of all fungicides show positive results in oncogenicity tests. These oncogenic fungicides represent from 31 million to 34 million of the 36 million kg of all fungicides applied annually in the US.
The NAS committee worked with a 1985 list of 53 pesticides that EPA considered oncogenic. However, an estimate of oncogenic potency was available only for 28 of the 53. In other words, NAS found that it could not estimate the risks for roughly half of the pesticides that EPA identified as oncogenic because necessary data on oncogenic potency were not available.
NAS says that, in doing risk assessments, EPA "tries to make necessary assumptions in a way that minimizes the chance of underestimating risks". "The result is that these [NAS] risk assessments probably overstate true oncogenic risk", NAS said. Risk refers to incidence of cancer cases, not death.
The NAS said there are four reasons why its risk estimates may overstate the risk, and four reasons why its estimates may understate the risk.
NAS estimated that the total risk from the 28 pesticides was 5.85 cancers per thousand people per lifetime. Dividing this by 70 (years in a lifetime) and multiplying it by the number of groups of 1000 in the US population yields an annual estimated pesticide-caused cancer incidence of 20,800 in the US. If half of the new pesticide-caused cancers each year result in death, this brings NAS's estimate of annual deaths from pesticides in food to 10,400 per year. How does this compare to deaths by assault rifles?
[From Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly.]