Public health advocates are markedly divided on the significance of a Government Accountability Office report on the failure of federal officials to test food for the most widely used farm pesticide.
The report said officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture do not test foods including meat, poultry, fruits and vegetables for residue from numerous pesticides, including glyphosate, the most commonly used farm pesticide.
“FDA and USDA have shirked their responsibilities by failing to monitor for and translate information from pesticide residues found on fruits and vegetables. The agencies should take action to correct the shortcomings uncovered in the GAO report,” said Emily Marquez, staff scientist for Pesticide Action Network.
PAN is a left-leaning, tax-exempt foundation that opposes the use of pesticides in agriculture and advocates “ecologically sound and socially just alternatives,” according to its website.
Since 2000, the Oakland, Calif., nonprofit has received 333 grants worth more than $17 million from likeminded charitable groups including the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Foundation for Deep Ecology, according to foundationsearch.com.
The absence of FDA and USDA monitoring, however, isn’t necessarily something to worry about, according to Dr. Gilbert Ross, a physician who is medical and executive director of the right-leaning American Council on Science and Health.
“Glyphosate has been used eagerly by farmers globally for 40 years plus, and every scientific study of it has found it to be inert for humans, animals and the environment,” Ross said. He noted that glyphosate was formerly marketed by Monsanto under the brand name Roundup.
ACSH is a nonprofit, tax-exempt foundation that advocates restoration of “science and common sense to personal and public health decisions in order to foster a scientifically sound and sensible public health policy.”
The New York nonprofit received 181 grants worth more than $7 million since 2000 from a wide spectrum of donors, including the F. M. Kirby Foundation, Gerber Foundation and ExxonMobil Foundation.
The FDA does not do “checks for several commonly used pesticides with an Environmental Protection Agency established tolerance (the maximum amount of a pesticide residue that is allowed to remain on or in a food) — including glyphosate, the most used agricultural pesticide,” GAO said in the report first reported Friday by the Washington Examiner.
A similar problem was found at the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, which “did not test meat, poultry, and processed egg products for all pesticides with established EPA tolerance levels,” the report said.
Neither agency is required by law to monitor glyphosate levels in commercially sold foods, but advocates of more stringent monitoring point out that the Environmental Protection Agency established tolerance levels due to the uncertainty of the pesticides effects, if any, on humans.
Marquez said “EPA’s tolerances are fundamentally weak, overlooking both impacts on children’s health and the synergistic or combined effects between pesticides.”
Ross responded that “just about everything under the sun has an EPA tolerance level, so, considering relative risks and scarce resources, it’s quite appropriate for the scientists at the FDA and the USDA to triage how to devote their resources. If they feel that testing for traces of a benign chemical such as glyphosate, is not a worthy use of their time, that seems to be a valid decision, in my humble opinion.”
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
