Pesticide bill

Though government agencies prevent pesticides considered probable carcinogens from being sprayed on crops in the United States, the chemicals may turn up on your table more often than you think. A sensible bill in the Senate would help reduce the unlikely chance of you unwittingly serving dangerous pesticides with your peas, and ought to be passed.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration monitor pesticide use in this country, but inspect only about 1 percent of imported foods, by the FDA’s own estimate. Many of the pesticides banned in this country and used regularly elsewhere are, ironically, produced in the United States. Proponents of a bill endorsed by Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, want to halt the production of those pesticides.

Specifically, the bill would ban the export of pesticides that are unregistered in the United States; bar food treated with those pesticides from entering this country; require international notification when a pesticide is registered, canceled or withdrawn; and require pesticide labels to be written in the language of the country where the pesticides are to be used. The bill wouldn’t stop the use of all possibly carcinogenic pesticides, but it would reduce the production and allow U.S. farmers to better compete with import markets.

In addition to the bill’s logical restrictions, the EPA could widen its regulatory scope to the many pesticides it does not currently test by using information from Codex Alimentarius, an international scientific group that sets safety standards on pesticide use, among other things. The Codex standards also could give farmers a more unified system for deciding which pesticides to use or avoid.

Even the backers of the Senate legislation say the food in the United States is among the safest in the world, and that the bill would only slightly improve that standing; what they rightfully want to see changed is the contradictory practice of both banning the use and allowing the production of dangerous pesticides. The rest is gravy.