If you want to get a disturbing look at the role the Bush administration is willing to give its industrial allies, there’s a must-read article in the Washington Post today about rat poison.
Over the past six years, the pesticide industry has fought off or stalled two regulatory initiatives designed to protect children and wildlife from becoming unintended victims of rat poisons, and public health and environmental groups charge that the industry had unusual access to block federal action.
Proposed child safety regulations were abandoned after more than five years of study, and an assessment of the impact of rat poisons on wildlife has been bogged down for about three years. Along the way, the Environmental Protection Agency gave the industry a rare opportunity to revise regulatory language for 15 months after it was in near-final form.
In the interim, the critics say, the toll has grown. Poison-control centers reported last year that more than 15,000 children younger than 6 accidentally ingested rat poison, up from fewer than 11,000 a decade ago. Wildlife organizations, meanwhile, charge that dozens of endangered animals die every year after ingesting rat poison spread to protect crops.
This is a really stunning story. The administration, naturally, is denying giving its industry allies an inappropriate role in the process, but the Natural Resources Defense Council seems to have the goods. The group has docs showing that Bush’s EPA not only worked hand-in-hand with the industry, but also complied when manufacturers wanted the risks associated with rat poison downplayed in EPA assessments.
Aaron Colangelo, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who obtained the EPA’s internal documents for the environmental advocacy group under a Freedom of Information Act request, said the documents highlight how the agency mishandled its effort to protect humans and animals.
“EPA’s acquiescence to the demands of the rat poison industry is a disturbing example of the Bush administration EPA allowing industry literally to rewrite the rules,” Colangelo said.
It’s also a partisan reminder about which party will put industry demands over public health concerns.
The fight over pesticides began in August 1998, when the EPA, under President Bill Clinton, published a document approving the use of rat poisons as long as the industry undertook certain precautions. The document concluded that rat poisons “pose a significant risk of accidental exposure to humans, particularly children, household pets, and non-target animals” but should remain on the market because they helped contain diseases rats and mice carry.
The agency, however, called for two new safeguards: adding an agent to make the poison taste more bitter and a dye that would make it more obvious if a child had ingested the poison.
In 2001 the agency reversed course, issuing a statement that it “came to a mutual agreement with the rodenticide [makers] to rescind the bittering agent and indicator dye requirements.”
But the most telling part of the story details how much power the EPA was willing to cede to poison manufacturers.
At the behest of the industry, the EPA made broad changes to play down the dangers posed by rat poison, including rewriting a section describing the fatal poisoning of seven deer.
While refusing to meet with consumer and environmental groups, the agency held five closed-door meetings with members of the Rodenticide Registrants Task Force, whose members include Syngenta Crop Protection, Bell Laboratories Inc. and LiphaTech Inc.
EPA deleted language the industry objected to: At one point a staffer wrote in an e-mail that there would be “no references to mitigation and no words/phrases etc. that could evoke emotion on the part of” the industry task force. The document initially said that seven deer in New York state “have been poisoned by anticoagulants. . . . The incidents depict how toxic rodenticide baits can be even to large animals”; at the industry’s suggestion this was amended to “Seven deer in New York state tested positive for anticoagulants,” with the second phrase dropped altogether.
I know I’m not supposed to be surprised by the Bush administration anymore, but these guys continue to find ways to frighten me.