MOFGA Testimony in Opposition to L.D. 1791
"An Act to Increase the Number of Members on the Board of Pesticides Control"
January 23, 2006
My name is Alice Percy. I submit this testimony on behalf of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, being a member of the Board and chair of the Public Policy Committee. In this capacity I represent MOFGA's 301 certified organic farmers and our membership of over 4000 people, practically all of whom are Maine citizens. My husband and I hold a family membership in MOFGA and our pastured pork operation became one of MOFGA's newest certified organic farms in November 2005. I am a lifetime resident of Whitefield and a recent graduate of the Environmental Studies program at Colby College in Waterville. For the past three years I have attended the meetings of the Board of Pesticides Control as a reporter for MOFGA's newspaper, and as a result I am quite familiar with its character and proceedings.
I commend the Maine Board of Pesticides Control for doing the best it can in a tight spot. A barrage of demands and complaints from diverse interests (the structural applicator industry, the commercial agricultural applicators, the environmental organizations, conventional farmers, organic farmers, pesticide manufacturers, pesticide dealers, beekeepers, lawn care companies, homeowners - the list goes on too long to continue) hedges in its members from every direction. Meanwhile - as the BPC Board members and staff will be the first to remind you - they try to use their barely sufficient resources to protect and inform an often ignorant public. I am sure you agree that we ought to be using state legislation to help them do their job better.
Instead, L.D. 1791, "An Act to Increase the Number of Members on the Board of Pesticides Control," shoots the Board in the foot. For is it not the obvious purpose of the Maine Board of Pesticides Control to control (that is, by the dictionary definition, to restrain, to influence, or to reduce the incidence of) the use of pesticides in Maine? The Maine legislature seemed to think so in 1997, when it passed "An Act to Minimize Reliance on Pesticides." The best way to ensure that a regulatory body achieves its purpose is to furnish it with members who believe in that purpose. The best way to ensure that a regulatory body accomplishes nothing is to saddle it with multiple members who have a patent conflict of interest, and who will place every conceivable blockade before any meaningful regulation suggested by the other members.
L.D. 1791 follows the second path. Maine's structural applicators and the leaders of Maine's business associations have clearly displayed their approach to pesticide use and regulation during the hearings for the BPC's proposed Chapter 26 rules mandating Integrated Pest Management and notification for indoor applications of pesticides to public buildings. The Board has now substantially revised these rules for the third time in a too-eager attempt to assuage the very vocal concerns of these special interest groups. After each revision the industry representatives return to claim on the one hand that the Chapter 26 rule would impose an expensive and time-consuming burden on pest control operators and on Maine businesses, and on the other hand that it would accomplish nothing since Maine's PCOs are paragons of restraint and responsibility and already do everything that Chapter 26 would require anyway. In other words, they do not wish the state to enact regulations that would hinder their ability to apply any pesticide they wish at any time to any place. They do not wish pesticides to be controlled.
Yet it is obvious that pesticides must be controlled for the public good. All pesticides are purposefully designed to harm living organisms. Many, if not most, commonly used pesticides have been shown to be carcinogenic, to cause reproductive failures, or to cause neurological damage in human beings. Several decades of research into and practice of organic methods of pest control have shown that we can almost always avoid the epidemiological and economic damages caused by pest species without resorting to these highly toxic substances. Unfortunately, the pest control industry does not like to be told that its services, such as they are now, are no longer required. Meanwhile, despite the industry's claims of angelic obedience to the tenets of Integrated Pest Management, the acts of pest control operators necessitate several enforcement actions by the Board of Pesticides Control every month. Some of these - including the cases mentioned already by Sharon Tisher - involve indoor applications and result in cases of pesticide poisoning in innocent bystanders.
MOFGA could easily support a bill with the same name as L.D. 1791 if the members to be added to the BPC were demonstrably interested in helping it to perform its task. If, for example, one of the new members were to be an organic dairy farmer, whose cornfields might be threatened by the drift of pesticides and genetically modified pollen from the fields of a neighboring conventional grower. The impossibility of restricting pesticides to the target application area presents a real economic threat to MOFGA's farmers, a threat that is not taken seriously enough by agricultural pesticide applicators. In past years there have been several BPC enforcement actions involving the illegal contamination of organic crops due to the negligent application of pesticides. In fact, at their January 20th meeting the Board of Pesticides Control referred to the Attorney General's office a case in which a helicopter engaged in the aerial spraying of a blueberry field in Columbia, Maine directly discharged Orbit onto the grounds of a neighboring organic farmer. The concerns of organic growers - who represent an appreciable percentage of Maine's commercial agriculture - are not adequately represented on the Board of Pesticides Control. Or we might suggest the addition of a leading member of a state environmental organization, someone with experience of the impact of toxic drift on private homeowners or apartment dwellers. The addition of these members would truly lend balance to the approach the BPC takes to new regulations and the enforcement of existing regulations.
To add a structural pesticide applicator and a business association representative to the Board of Pesticides Control would utterly reduce it to a useless, bureaucratic, bookkeeping agency. If you like the idea of a Board of Pesticides Control that will buck the national trend by reintroducing hazardous limited use pesticides to the general market, then you probably like L.D. 1791. If you wish the Board of Pesticides Control would roll back those pesky restrictions on the whens and wheres of pesticide use - restrictions imposed to protect public health or ecologically sensitive areas - then you must be rooting for L.D. 1791. If you believe, however, as I know you do, that the Board of Pesticides Control should be controlling pesticides to defend Maine - our working organic farms, our waterways, our children, our homes, our pregnant women, our fish populations, and ourselves - against unwanted and unnecessary pollution by poisonous substances, then please register your opposition to this dangerous and ill-intentioned act.
Respectfully submitted,
Alice T. Percy Chair, Public Policy Committee Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association