In the last several months, many groups, including consumer, public health, environmental and producer groups, have called for greater transparency of EPA's risk assessment processes. Real transparency, however, must include a full sharing of information regarding risks for individual pesticides or groups of pesticide chemicals with the public. It is ironic the TRAC, which was formed to recommend ways to improve transparency, was prevented from reviewing information fundamental to illuminating the agency's assessment of these extremely toxic chemicals. Despite a commitment from EPA that they would share the risk assessments for individual organophosphates based on dietary exposure alone, TRAC members and the public received, at best, garbled information about organophosphates that did little to inform the debate surrounding these chemicals for producers or consumers. At best, we learned that EPA believes that roughly half of the OPs exceed the safety standard based on their current analyses.
Consumers deserve to know more than that.
They deserve to know which pesticides may be a problem, why the agency believes those pesticides exceed the safety standard and what the Agency intends to do to protect consumers, particularly infants and children. Similarly, producers deserve to know which pesticides they use may be at risk so that they can provide the agency with any necessary information that may aid the agency's decision making. In part, producer's fears about FQPA are founded on the belief that EPA intends to cancel all uses of all organophosphates. That fear cannot be alleviated and specific grower concerns cannot be addressed until EPA provides more information about which pesticides may pose excessive health risks. Yet EPA buckled to pressure from the agrichemical industry to withhold vital information.