Washington state’s potato commission has filed a friend of the court brief in support of a petition from several chemical companies to force the EPA to review a moratorium.
The petition asks that the use of a human risk factor of 500 percent the EPA will use under the moratorium be disallowed as arbitrary. Instead it asks that existing human-testing data from the crop-protection chemical re-registration process be used.
The brief was filed Nov. 1 in District of Columbia Federal Circuit Court, advising the court of some practical ramifications of prohibiting existing human-testing data.
In the brief, the WSPC provided an example of how this moratorium will negatively impact certain chemicals on potatoes, such as the insecticide aldicarb.
If the EPA throws out existing data and adopts the 500 percent risk factor it will likely prevent the re-registration of various crop-protection products.
The situation came to light last December when the EPA announced it would not consider human data, whether new or existing in its regulatory decision-making process. If this is a final action, EPA violated notice and comment requirements, which allow presentation of challenging evidence.