AG GROUPS UNITE IN SUPPORT OF ATRAZINE

News Date January 26, 2010

Earlier this month, 53 commodity groups and producers from around the U.S. joined to express their concern on the re-evaluation of the widely used herbicide atrazine in a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson. In the letter the groups write that they are “troubled by the activist forces that seem to be guiding the very intensive and urgent re-evaluation (actually a re-re-evaluation) of atrazine despite its recently completed re-registration, which provided for its continued safe use.”

This letter was in response to a coalition of environmental activists who voiced their opinion in a letter to the EPA as well, stating they have “strong concerns about the safety of the herbicide.” Included in the letter, the activists called for a review that sets a standard for vetting the safety of agrichemicals.

Atrazine has been reviewed numerous times by the EPA, most recently in a 2006 re-registration review in which EPA approved atrazine for continued agricultural use and concluded that atrazine poses “no harm to the general U.S. population, infants, children or other major identifiable subgroups of consumers.”

Atrazine is used in more than 60 countries throughout the world, and for the past 50 years has been an essential tool for farmers of a variety of crops. The EPA estimates savings of $28 per acre in herbicide costs and yield advantages when atrazine is in use. The herbicide is also effective in conservation till or no-till systems and can help to reduce soil erosion by as much as 90 percent when compared to intensive tillage practices.

According to the Hudson Institute’s Dennis T. Avery and Alex Avery, if farmers lose the ability to use atrazine, “it will mean higher food costs, more soil erosion, less sustainable farming, and more environmental degradation. It’ll mean putting more of our farming eggs in fewer baskets.”  (By: Brett Schubert; Contact: Nathan Bowen)