EPA announced its plans for implementing National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) recommendations for managing three pesticides, chlorpyrifos among them, to ensure the protection of west coast salmon under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
l Dow AgroSciences believes current chlorpyrifos labeling, is already protective of west coast salmon.
l The recommendations issued by NMFS last November would have imposed arbitrary restrictions lacking in scientific foundation, curtailing the use of products essential to sustainable crop production, resulting in severe disruption to western agriculture.
l EPA has announced plans for implementing a modified set of restrictions on these three products, based on a more realistic scientific assessment. The Agency believes these measures to be equally protective of salmon as those proposed by NMFS while being less disruptive for agriculture.
l It is encouraging to see better science being brought to bear by EPA for assessment of risks to salmon and the development of mitigation options. While EPAs approach remains more highly conservative than is perhaps warranted, we are prepared to work with the Agency and growers to implement a set of restrictions based on EPAs announcement.
We believe that the controversies that have been created for western growers by this issue relative to these three products have been largely unnecessary and have been needlessly aggravated by litigation-driven deadlines that resulted in disregard of a wealth of scientific data and antagonism amongst agencies with a common goal of protecting endangered and threatened species. We are encouraged to hear that under the Obama Administration EPA and NMFS are currently in discussions about ways to accelerate and streamline a consultation process that all sides recognize has been broken for far too long.
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