(Continued from Page A 10)
(the farming side) is made up of
the hard-working, responsible
conservationists who grow our
food. (Higher crop yields have
saved IS million square miles of
wildlands from being plowed for
crops.) Let’s further suppose, for
the sake of argument, that the
other side (let’s call them eco
zealots, just to pull a label out of
thin air) are certified, off-the
wall extremists.
If you, as a regulator, keep
splitting the difference in a
debate between responsible pes
ticide users and shouting ban
them-all demonstrators, you will
gradually veer toward banning
everything. You will eventually
deprive your farmers of the key
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inputs needed to protect your
food against bugs, bacteria, and
weeds. That will ultimately force
you to either starve millions of
people, or plow down millions of
acres of wildlands for low-yield
crops.
Soil erosion has been the
Achilles heel of civilization for
the 10,000 years since we
learned to farm. (Before that,
our weakness was a tendency to
kill all the game in the area and
then start a war over hunting
rights with the tribe next door.)
In the last 25 years, we solved
the erosion problem with a
system called conservation til
lage. Conservation tillage uses
crop residue to protect the soil
structure and cuts soil erosion
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you a system that wiHJast many years
by up to 90 percent. Instead of
burying weed seeds with the
moldboard plowing that used to
invite wind and water erosion, it
uses herbicides to control weeds.
The U.S. Society for Soil and
Water Conservation noted that
conservation tillage is a key part
of “the most sustainable farm
ing in human history.”
Atrazine is the most flexible
and cost-effective herbicide for
conservation tillage. It’s been
used for decades, in at least 80
countries, on all sorts of terrain
and circumstances, with no dis
covered health or environmental
side effects.
The eco-zealots target atra
zine because traces of it are often
occasionally found in our
groundwater. They make the
usual cancer allegation. But the
EPA itself recently reclassified
atrazine as “not likely to be car
cinogenic to humans.” This
echoes an earlier decision by the
International Agency for Re
search on Cancer, which says
atrazine cannot be classified as a
Whichever the
Producer Prefers
carcinogen. That essentially
means that atrazine is safer than
the chlorine we use to purify our
drinking water. Chlorine actu
ally does cause tumors in rats at
high doses. But it also kills the
bacteria that would otherwise
kill us.
Paracelsus 500 years ago laid
down the basic rule of toxicol
ogy: “The dose makes the
poison.” Almost everything is
dangerous at high levels, includ
ing table salt. Almost nothing is
dangerous at low levels.
The U.S. permits only a tiny
amount of atrazine in drinking
water: 3 parts per billion (ppb)
(That’s like three aspirin tablets
in an Olympic-sized swimming
pool.) Great Britain allows 15
ppb. Australia has set the limit
at 20 ppb. The French Minister
of Agriculture has banned it
but that’s a political gesture. He
offers no evidence that atrazine
is not safe.
The EPA has come up with a
couple of pretty far-fetched ac-
cusations in its latest round of
atrazine musings:
A. Atrazine may disrupt the
homing instincts of salmon. (Sci-
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ence doesn’t give much credit
for “may,” and salmon are ex
posed to virtually no atrazine.)
B. “Continued atrazine use is
likely to pose a risk to health
and integrity of some aquatic
communities.” (A single study
claimed atrazine would kill the
underwater weeds on which
some marine creatures feed; but
an independent scientific panel
concluded “The inferred effects
. . . cannot be confirmed from
the published data, and were
discounted in subsequent publi
cations by the same research
ers.”)
All of this sounds like a pretty
thin basis for banning restricting
one of our most important con
servation tools. Especially since
the same eco-zealots who want
to ban atrazine are defending a
widely-used organic pesticide
pyrethrum which an EPA sci
ence panel has classified as “a
likely human carcinogen.”
Dennis Avery
Senior Fellow Director
Center for Global
Food Issues
Hudson Institute
5935 OLD PHILADELPHIA PIKE, GAP, PA 17527
PHONE: 717-442-8134 • FAX 717-442-3112
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