California eyes compulsory pesticides spraying including organic crops at the state's discretion
Showdown looms as California eyes pesticides
ELLEN KNICKMEYER, Associated Press Updated 5:26 pm,
Saturday, November 8, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — With organic food growers reporting
double-digit growth in U.S. sales each year, producers are challenging a
proposed California pest-management program they say enshrines a
pesticide-heavy approach for decades to come, including compulsory spraying of
organic crops at the state's discretion.
Chief among the complaints of organic growers: The
California Department of Food and Agriculture's pest-management plan says
compulsory state pesticide spraying of organic crops would do no economic harm
to organic producers, on the grounds that the growers could sell sprayed crops
as non-organic instead.
"I would rather stop farming than have to be a
conventional farmer. I think I am not alone in that," said Zea Sonnabend,
a Watsonville organic apple-grower with California Certified Organic Farmers,
one of more than 30 agriculture groups, environmental organizations and
regional water agencies to file concerns about the agriculture department's
pesticide provisions by an Oct. 31 state deadline.
At issue is a California organic agriculture industry that
grew by 54 percent between 2009 and 2012. California leads the nation in
organic sales, according to statistics tracked by University of
California-Davis agriculture economist Karen Klonsky, who says the state is
responsible for roughly one-third of a national organic industry. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture puts the overall value of the U.S. organic sector at
$35 billion.
The U.S. organic industry has seen a similar growth spurt
nationally in the same time frame, and three out of four grocery stores in the
country now carry at least some organic goods, according to the USDA.
California's $43 billion agriculture industry is the largest in the country by
revenue, so what happens here matters to consumers and to the agriculture
industry nationwide.
The state's more than 500-page document lays out its
planned responses to the next wave of fruit flies, weevils, beetles, fungus or
blight that threatens crops. Many groups challenging the plan complained that
it seems to authorize state agriculture officials to launch pesticide
treatments without first carrying out the currently standard separate
environmental-impact review.
But Steve Lyle, a spokesman for the agriculture
department, said the outline doesn't give state crop-pest programs any power
they don't already have by law.
The state's program is designed "to protect
California's food system through the principles of integrated pest management,
while also protecting public health and the environment," Lyle said in an
email.
For some conventional growers as well as some organic
ones, the fate of the pest-management plan outlined by the state isn't a
theoretical concern.
It's an immediate issue of their economic survival due,
in part, to a disease-carrying pest that's a little bigger than a pencil point.
The disease spread by the Asian citrus psyllid kills
citrus trees outright and has caused billions of dollars in damage to crops in
Florida and Texas. California's $2.4 billion citrus industry has found
incursions by the bug, but not yet significant outbreaks of the disease it
carries.
The standard treatment for the citrus pest is
conventional pesticides, including neocotinoids linked to the decline of
crop-pollinating bees. The citrus industry and federal government also have
spent $25 million to try to find, without major breakthroughs so far, less
toxic controls for the citrus pest, said Joel Nelsen, head of the California
Citrus Mutual industry trade-group.
Organic farmers complain about the state's frequent
reliance on pesticides, but "if we don't eradicate the pest, their organic
production is non-existent," Nelsen said. "A pest or a disease
doesn't know if it's eating an organic or a non-organic orange."
Organic farmers are asking the state to give more
consideration to non-toxic controls, including long-term methods to strengthen
crops and habitats in advance against marauding tropical species, said Kelly
Damewood, policy director for California Certified Organic Farmers.
The growing alarm over the citrus bug is part of the
problem — California agriculture reels from pest emergency to pest emergency,
treating most with the same pesticide programs and crop quarantines, argued
James R. Carey, an entomologist at the University of California-Davis. He's
been watching California respond to invading tropical pests since at least the
1980s' Mediterranean fruit-fly spray program. Some programs were successful;
others struck even many conventional growers as unnecessary.
"They treat this in a crisis mode in the same way
they would an earthquake or a fire," Carey said. "Most times there's
not that kind of urgency at all.
"Every pest that comes in that they request federal
money for, run out of money for, and it just kinds of fades away."
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