Earth Protect Blog

By Coral Davenport

© The New York Times Co.

WASHINGTON » The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it is banning a common pesticide, widely used since 1965 on fruits and vegetables, from use on food crops because it has been linked to neurological damage in children.

The Environmental Protection Agency said this week it would publish a regulation to block the use of chlorpyrifos on food. One of the most widely used pesticides, chlorpyrifos is commonly applied to corn, soybeans, apples, broccoli, asparagus and other produce.

The new rule, which will take effect in six months, follows an order in April by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that directed the EPA to halt the agricultural use of the chemical unless it could demonstrate its safety.

In an unusual move, the new chlorpyrifos policy will not be put in place via the standard regulatory process, under which the EPA first publishes a draft rule then takes public comment before publishing a final rule. Rather, in compliance with the court order, which noted that the science linking chlorpyrifos to brain damage is more than a decade old, the rule will be published in final form, without a draft or public comment period.

The announcement is the latest in a series of moves by the Biden administration to re-create, strengthen or reinstate more than 100 environmental regulations. “Today EPA is taking an overdue step to protect public health,” the agency’s head, Michael S. Regan, said. “Ending the use of chlorpyrifos on food will help to ensure children, farmworkers and all people are protected from the potentially dangerous consequences of this pesticide.”

Environmental organizations, health advocates and groups representing farmworkers have long sought to stop the use of the chlorpyrifos, after studies showed exposure to the pesticide was linked to lower birth weights, reduced IQs and other developmental problems in children. Studies traced some of those health effects to prenatal exposure to the pesticide.

Several of those groups last year petitioned the EPA to reverse a Trump-era decision not to ban the use of the chemical.

“It took far too long, but children will no longer be eating food tainted with a pesticide that causes intellectual learning disabilities,” said Patti Goldman, an attorney at Earthjustice, one of the organizations behind the federal position. “Chlorpyrifos will finally be out of our fruits and vegetables.”

Several states — including California, Hawaii, New York and Maryland — have banned or restricted the use of chlorpyrifos, and the attorneys general of those states, as well as those of Washington, Vermont and Massachusetts, joined the petition.

The Obama administration began the process of revoking all uses of the pesticide in 2015 but, in 2020, the Trump administration ignored the recommendations of EPA scientists and kept chlorpyrifos on the market. That set off a wave of legal challenges.

Those challenges concluded with the court order in April, which gave the EPA a deadline of Aug. 20 to either demonstrate that chlorpyrifos does not harm children or to legally end its use on food crops.