Thank you. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I appreciate the invitation to present testimony for the Subcommittee on Department Operations, Nutrition, and Foreign Agriculture on the Implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act. I am Mark E. Whalon, Interim Director of the Center for Integrated Plant Systems, Assistant Director of the Michigan Agriculture Experiment Station, and Professor of Entomology at Michigan State University in East Lansing. I am testifying on behalf of the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST) in Ames, Iowa, a nonprofit organization composed of 36 scientific societies and many other members. Its mission is to identify food and fiber, environmental, and other agricultural issues and to interpret related scientific research information for legislators, regulators, and the media for use in public policy decision making. I am chairing a task force of scientists presently preparing a CAST report on "Impact of EPA Implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act."

Pursuant to the request for input, I offer a series of comments relevant to the implementation of the FQPA.

CAST is supportive of the broad principals encompassed in the FQPA directed pesticide registration and reregistration processes including (1) greater protection for the most at- risk portions of our society when appropriate, (2) consideration of whether groups of pesticides have a common mode of action, and (3) consideration of the aggregate exposure of pesticides in diet, drinking water, and nonoccupational exposure.

However, we are concerned that the manner and time in which these changes may be implemented will significantly alter agriculture’s ability to control insect, mite, and disease problems. Our concerns specifically focus on unintended negative impacts on IPM programs, resistance management, minor crops, perception of safety in the food supply, and competitiveness of U.S. agriculture. We also have questions regarding the public resources available to facilitate implementation of alternative pest controls after FQPA mediated changes in agriculture and human and animal health protection.

Integrated pest management (IPM) programs are knowledge and information intensive and site specific management systems. One of the principal dangers of the FQPA is that it would remove critical insecticide tools like the organophosphates (OP), carbamates (CB), some herbicides, and B-2 fungicides before replacement chemistries or other alternatives and IPM programs are available. In some agronomic crops like corn and soybeans, there are, with some exceptions, workable alternatives for these tools. The situation for cotton, minor crops, and human and animal health protection is dramatically different. In some agricultural key pest, mosquito, tick, and cockroach control programs, there are no immediate alternatives to the OP, CB, or B-2 tools. Significant adverse consequences will likely result from a sudden loss of pest management systems predicated on these materials. In the short-term, our reliance on fewer and fewer chemistries resulting from current EPA-FQPA rulemaking will increase pesticide resistance. To address these concerns, the EPA should adapt its rulemaking to accommodate these critical pest control situations through time-limited tolerances and emergency exemptions that allow development of alternative IPM systems. In addition, more registrant, commodity, and public support should be directed to IPM, pesticide alternatives, and resistance management strategies in production and protection systems where FQPA mediated changes will disrupt current pest control.

The potential for shifts in agricultural production and processing from FQPA implementation clearly exists. It is likely that these shifts will occur in minor crops including fruit and vegetable production. The beneficiary of such changes will likely be areas where disease, mite, nematode, and insect pressures are lower. The elimination of key pesticides or classes of pesticides could trigger international impacts similar to the shifts that would occur domestically. Especially troublesome, particularly because of expanded free trade and limited monitoring resources, is the prospect that foreign producers could continue to use pesticides that U.S. producers could no longer use under the FQPA.

The elimination of FQPA-targeted pesticides should be predicated on the availability of viable pest control alternatives. This is especially true when these tools are used to protect the nation from insects, mites, ticks, and cockroaches that transmit disease. There are essentially two somewhat disparate views of what "pesticide alternatives" are. In the first, alternatives are essentially products that can be directly substituted for FQPA targeted tools. However, many of these tools have significant problems because they may cause secondary pest outbreaks, impact nontarget organisms or lead to other damaging environmental effects. In other words, the risks of unintended consequences may outweigh the risk under FQPA (risk-risk analysis). A second class of alternatives include parabiological, augmentative, and/or classical biological controls. However, many of these alternatives have relatively narrow spectrums of activity, that is, they do not manage some key pests or they may be completely ineffective where food safety and human health concerns require essentially 100% control of a pest or pests. In most cases, the available alternatives have not been incorporated into workable IPM systems. Biological control alternatives are very important and will increase in importance, but in general, they are only partially effective alone and/or they require significant additional resources (personnel, capital, research, or information) to implement. If all the FQPA targeted pesticides were lost in the next 3 to 6 years, additional public support would have to be developed to augment IPM alternatives through land-grant university IPM (USDA/CSREES) and USDA/ARS programs, IR-4, USDA's Pest Management Alternative Programs, and Regional IPM Competitive grant programs.

At the same time that the USDA and the FDA are being directed by initiatives from the administration and Congress to increase food safety standards, most of the EPA-FQPA targeted pesticides are critical for reducing pest contamination, adulteration, and putrefaction of food and fiber products. To illustrate this dilemma, we estimate that each percent reduction of a pest or contaminant beyond 95% requires 2 to 10x more pesticide use. Another significant point is that all production systems must address this same relationship whether they are a pesticide calendar spray, IPM, or an organic program.

The EPA may use two rules in implementing the FQPA that are particularly challenging. First, in the absence of residue data, the EPA will use default assumptions for risk assessment, which assume that each pesticide or group of pesticides is used at maximum rate, at maximum frequency, and up to the legally defined last day of treatment. These default assumptions significantly overestimate actual residues in most instances. Therefore, the EPA should grant time-limited tolerances in these critical pest control situations and should issue a data call-in where residue data are not available. The principle point is that agriculture and human health protection must have the tools and systems to manage pests to ensure a healthy nation.

In pre-FQPA pesticide tolerance establishment, the EPA used a simple procedure of setting the residue level where none was detected at "1/2 the limit of detection." This rule made sense because each pesticide was registered without an additional 10x kids’ safety factor, or consideration for common mode of action, or aggregate exposure. Under the FQPA, the residue tolerance for OPs, CBs and B-2s will almost certainly be very low and every use will contribute to the allowable "residue cup" even if the residue is actually zero. Therefore, it is conceivable that the "residue cup" could be exceeded or filled up with one or a few application(s) on one crop and no other uses will be allowed.

In summary, without a balanced risk-risk analysis and time-sensitive approach to FQPA implementation, significant unintended consequences to U.S. agriculture and to human health pest management could result.