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... continued How Congress tackles important issues In spite of worries over synergistic effects of synthetic chemicals on environmental and human health, the evidence suggests that not eating fruit and vegetables is a lot more detrimental to your health than is eating produce that has been judiciously sprayed with pesticides and then washed. Regardless, there's an acronym on a lot of lips these days that has turned pesticide residues into a major food safety issue: FQPA. The Food Quality Protection Act could, at least by some standards, be one of the biggest blunders Congress has ever made. "I've wondered a lot lately," Allan Felsot comments, "whether industry realizes what a potential mess it has gotten itself, and by association our farmers, into by its passive support of the FQPA last year." Felsot is a toxicologist with the Food and Environmental Quality Laboratory at WSU Tri-Cities. Adds Ted Alway: "The FQPA to a great extent is attacking a problem that does not exist." Alway is the Cooperative Extension tree fruit and integrated pest management educator based in Wenatchee. A thought occurs: If focusing on food safety gives us consumers a sense of control, as Ray Jussaume insists, could it be the same with Congress, unable to deal with more complex, more pressing issues? If it weren't so looming, and if it weren't a bill, one could almost write off the FQPA as an afterthought, a political win-win, one of those deals dashed off before the August recess in an election year. Which it was. Felsot addresses the result in a recent three-part series, "The Quest for Absolute Safety," in Wheat Life: "Obsessed with killing the infamous Delaney Clause regulating pesticide residues in processed food, industry claimed it got what it wanted as the FQPA replaced Delaney with uniform tolerances for raw and processed foods. The euphoria was wasted on a Pyrrhic victory. As the dust settled, keen observers knew that the war had actually been won by those groups that have been fighting for a long time to severely restrict pesticide use to nil..."  As Felsot goes on to explain, the FQPA actually amends two existing pesticide laws, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. Although it is still not clear what effect the actual implementation of the FQPA will have on agriculture, one thing does seem clear. Risk assessments under the FQPA will focus largely on health issues, writes Felsot. "Perhaps the most profound change was elimination of consideration of benefits in the granting of tolerances for many currently registered pesticides." In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal following the meteoric passage of the FQPA, Jonathan Tolman, an environmental policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, warned that the upshot of the act would eventually be higher food prices. This might not be such a bad thing. The one policy that has remained unexamined since the Depression, according to Ray Jussaume, is cheap food. "Cheap food ideology is still the goal of the USDA. For some countries that's not the goal, it's the best food. In spite of 60 years of cheap food policy, we still have people on the street who don't have enough to eat. Cheap food versus safe food, what kind of corners do you cut? Or do you not cut any corners at all?" Perhaps Jussaume's questions could be added to the list of those for which "food safety," conventionally discussed, serves as a diversion. A third way? | C O N T E N T S | H O M E | |
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