Last week, the NAAA and a coalition of industry partners sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler expressing strong concerns about the ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordering the EPA to revoke all tolerances and registrations for chlorpyrifos.

The letter explained that while chlorpyrifos has been deemed safe by both the EPA and the European Food Safety Authority, the consequences of the ruling go beyond just chlorpyrifos and threatens the established regulatory process for all crop protection tools. The letter reads, in part, “the only legal avenue for EPA to ‘modify or revoke a tolerance’ is to undertake the administrative process delegated to the Agency by Congress. That process has not been completed, and the Court cannot substitute its judgment for EPA and tell EPA the scientific conclusion it must reach.”

The EPA has until Sept. 24 to petition for a rehearing. If they do, a hearing must take place within 45 days.

The letter continues, “The current EPA safety standard for chlorpyrifos properly rests on five decades of experience in use, health surveillance of manufacturing workers and applicators, and over 4,000 studies and reports that have examined the product in terms of health, safety and the environment.”

Corteva Agriscience, a manufacturer of chlorpyrifos, said all uses and tolerance remain intact until the EPA makes a final decision, and the EPA “has options to challenge this decision.”

The court ruling stems from a petition filed in 2007 by the Pesticide Action Network North America and the Natural Resources Defense Council. As a result, the Obama administration’s EPA proposed to revoke all food tolerances for chlorpyrifos. NAAA met with EPA to discuss its proposed decision on the chlorpyrifos ban and submitted comments to keep chlorpyrifos on the market for aerial application. NAAA communicated to EPA the numerous technologies used in our industry addressing on target application of crop protection products. Additionally, NAAA explained to the EPA that the agency had misinterpreted the Food Quality Protection Act and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act by trying to establish a standard of “absolute certainty that no harm will result” from a pesticide instead of a standard of “reasonable certainty that no harm will result.”

NAAA also stressed concern that EPA justified revoking tolerances for chlorpyrifos in part by relying on a secret study from Columbia University where important data points were not made available to EPA or anyone else for review.