EPA Wins One For The Environment For A Change, Wins Fight To Ban Bayer’s Deadly Insecticide Containing Flubendiamide
In these days of captive agencies cravenly cowering before the power of the billion dollar corporations they are supposed to be regulating (for reference, please see Wall Street/SEC, factory farming/USDA, pharmaceuticals/FDA, etc. etc.) it always comes as a shock when a regulatory agency actually, you know, regulates something in such a way that it benefits the people and the environment.
Weird, right? This is a story you young folks can tell your mutated cancer-ridden grandchildren living underground to escape the searing heat and the poisoned landscape about what is surely one of the last times this will have occurred:
The Tale of How The Environmental Protection Agency Actually Did Its Job and Told Bayer to Get Stuffed, or Forcing A Ban On A Dangerous Chemical Called Flubendiamide.
In a small miracle, a brutally powerful insecticide known as flubendiamide has been banned following a prolonged fight between the EPA and Bayer AG, a chemical that is found in several brands such as Bayer’s Belt brand, Nichino America’s Tourismo and Vetica insecticides.
For a glimpse in how the EPA normally does business–and we do mean business–let’s take a look at the regulatory history of flubendiamide.
The insecticide, which had previously been approved for use on over 200 types of crops, was prescribed to be applied as many as six times a season, had been granted a “conditional registration” back in 2008.
This means that the company, while admitting that it hadn’t done all the toxicity studies normally required, would have the sales of its product approved, with the stipulation that Bayer would have five years to conduct studies that would show that flubendiamide was safe for invertebrate aquatic animals. Bayer agreed that if the studies showed harm for aquatic invertebrates, it would voluntarily withdraw the product.
Seven years later, the promised studies by Bayer having not been forthcoming, the EPA’s own studies showed that, yes indeed, the product had the aforementioned adverse effects. So in January of this year, EPA gave Bayer notice that as per the agreement, they must pull the product.
Bayer, being the multi-billion dollar concern that it is, announced that such rules were for peasants, and refused to comply, saying they would “…instead will seek a review of the product’s registration in an administrative law hearing.”
Cue the reports today that the battle is lost, and Bayer has to stop selling this product.
Of course, the past eight years of damage that has been done to the environment and possibly humans gets swept under the rug.
Score one for the good guys, I guess, but there is something profoundly wrong with the way we approve these deadly poisons for use on our food. And if something doesn’t change soon, we might not even have enough humanity left to crawl underground and scratch out a living in a few generations.
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https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/03/08/epa-cancels-registration-flubendiamide-pesticide-bayer-refuses-stop-sales/