The US Environmental Protection Agency has in effect ignored a 2020 federal court order prohibiting the use of Monsanto and other producers’ toxic dicamba-based herbicides that are destroying millions of acres of cropland, harming endangered species and increasing cancer risks for farmers, new fillings in the lawsuit charge.
Instead of permanently yanking the products from the market after the 2020 order, the EPA only required industry to add further application instructions to the herbicides’ labels before reapproving the products.
A late 2021 EPA investigation found the same problems persist even with new directions added to the label, but the agency still allows Monsanto, BASF and other producers to continue using dicamba.
“The new litigation was prompted by the EPA’s decision to ignore the court’s ruling and move forward with reapproving the pesticide,” plaintiffs in the lawsuit wrote in a statement. “In re-approving dicamba, the EPA once again failed to weigh the true costs to farmers and the environment.”
The fillings are a continuation of the 2020 lawsuit, which was brought by the National Family Farm Coalition, Center for Food Safety, Center for Biological Diversity and Pesticide Action Network North America. The groups are asking the court to again order the EPA to rescind approval of the controversial products.
The EPA’s move is another example of the agency “treating the pesticide industry not as regulated companies, but as clients”, said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director with the Center For Biological Diversity.
The EPA’s pesticide office is included in allegations that career managers are influenced by or have colluded with industry, and in some cases falsified science to make dangerous substances appear less toxic. About one-third of the pesticide office’s funding comes from industry fees.
“The pesticide industry has a ton of clout in the EPA’s pesticide office, a ton of ability to persuade people there, and the culture at the office is very in alliance with the pesticide industry,” Donley told the Guardian.
The EPA did not respond to a request for comment.
The agency in 2016 approved the dicamba-based herbicide developed by Monsanto, which was to be used on genetically modified soybean and cotton crops that the company designed and are “dicamba-tolerant”.
The herbicides are sprayed over fields and efficiently kill weeds. However, they are also highly volatile and prone to drifting into neighboring fields when they are spread, or can lift off the ground and plants and travel up to a mile.
When that happens, the herbicide can damage or kill neighboring crops and plants that are not engineered to be dicamba-resistant. Most frequently, the substance impairs their ability to grow or flower, and it reduces height and yield of non-dicamba-resistant crops.
The results are “devastating” and destroying millions of acres as “as never before seen in the history of US agriculture”, the plaintiffs said.
The herbicide also impairs plants and flowers’ ability to produce nectar, which environmental groups say deprives pollinators of food. In some cases, direct dicamba exposure can kill insects, mammals and other animals, Donley said, and it is linked to reproductive harm and developmental problems in animals.
Peer-reviewed studies also found dicamba likely doubled the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in Canadian farmers and increased rates of liver cancer in highly exposed US farmers.
Monsanto and BASF’s own science found the herbicide would probably cause such harm, according to documents released during a successful $265m lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer. The court in 2020 wrote in its order that the EPA “refused to estimate the amount of dicamba damage” that would be caused, and said it was “exceedingly unlikely” the agency could legally approve the herbicides.
Still, four months after the 2020 ruling, the EPA reapproved the herbicides after producers added directions to the labels. But the tweaks have not meaningfully reduced the problems, plaintiffs say, because “the real issue is that the weather-related usage instructions are so numerous and restrictive as to make it impossible” to properly apply the herbicides.
The EPA arrived at a similar finding in its investigation into the herbicides’ use during the 2021 growing season, and in December that year published a report detailing the “substantial” destruction of food crops in neighboring fields. It noted the label tweaks did not reduce the “number, severity, or geographic extent of dicamba-related incidents”.
The agency also documented damage to university research farms, cemeteries, churchyards, state fish and game properties, state natural areas, city parks, state and national wildlife refuges, state parks and other several public spaces.
It also acknowledged that the herbicide has “fractured” rural communities and led to “threats of violence”.
Still, the EPA did not rescind the approvals in 2022. In Bremer county, Iowa, Robert Faux’s organic Genuine Faux Farm sits in a rural region amid farms that heavily rely on dicamba fertilizers, Faux said in a declaration filed in support of the lawsuit.
After the EPA approved the herbicide in 2016 and his neighbors began spreading it, he has watched his farms’ production of up to 14 tons of food annually dwindle to seven tons in 2018. Prior to 2017, the farm produced up to 3,000 bell peppers annually, but that number dropped to seven in 2018.
Faux noted that he started growing some peppers in a wind tunnel that protected the plants from dicamba, and used the same methods as those plants that were unprotected. The protected plants thrived and the unprotected were stunted, he said.
Dicamba travels long distances and is widely used in the area, so it’s impossible to identify the source, Faux wrote, and he said it has strained his relationship with his neighbors who resent him for not using genetically engineered crops, which forces them to be more careful.
“It is clear to me that some of the solution needs to come from the source of the problem, which would be EPA’s registrations of dicamba products,” Faux wrote.
