WASHINGTON— The Environmental Protection Agency announced today that it has reapproved products containing the dangerous, drift-prone pesticide dicamba to be sprayed on genetically engineered cotton and soybeans.
The reapproval comes despite federal court decisions in 2020 and again in 2024 striking down the agency’s previous approvals of the weedkiller as unlawful.
Since its first approval in 2016, dicamba drift has damaged millions of acres of farmland and caused devastating damage to orchards, vegetable farms, home gardens, native plants, trees, and wildlife refuges across the country. Experts have found dicamba drift damage to be the worst of any herbicide in the history of U.S. agriculture. Yet the current approval provides even fewer protections from dicamba drift and damage than past approvals.
“The industry cronies at the EPA just approved a pesticide that they know drifts for miles and poisons organic crops, backyard gardens and 100-year-old trees,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “With reckless actions like this, Lee Zeldin is ‘MAHA-washing’ decisions that protect the profits of pesticide companies and industrial agriculture instead of shielding the rest of us from dangerous poisons.”
This approval comes months after Kyle Kunkler, a former lobbyist for the American Soybean Association, was installed as the deputy assistant administrator for pesticides in the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Kunkler has been a vocal cheerleader for dicamba, and this administration has not recused him from working on dicamba at the EPA despite his work lobbying for it during his previous employment.
Kunkler works under two former lobbyists for the American Chemistry Council, Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, who are now overseen by a fourth industry lobbyist, Doug Troutman, who was recently confirmed to lead the chemicals office following endorsement by the chemical council.
“The Trump administration’s hostility to farmers and rural America knows no bounds,” said Bill Freese, science director at Center for Food Safety. “Dicamba drift damage threatens farmers’ livelihoods and tears apart rural communities. And these are farmers and communities already reeling from Trump’s ICE raids on farmworkers, the trade war shutdown of soybean exports to China, and Trump’s bailout of Argentina, whose farmers are selling soybeans to the Chinese — soybeans China used to buy from American growers.”
A 2021 Inspector General’s investigation found that dicamba’s original approval excluded important scientific evidence during the first Trump administration’s rush to approve it.
Background
In 2016 Monsanto, which has since been acquired by Bayer, opened the floodgates to massive spraying of dicamba by genetically engineering soybeans and cotton to withstand “over-the-top” spraying of the pesticide. The results have been devastating, with drift damage to millions of acres of non-genetically engineered soybeans as well as to orchards, gardens, trees and other plants on a scale unprecedented in the history of U.S. farming. Dozens of imperiled species, including pollinators like monarch butterflies and rusty patched bumblebees, are also threatened by the pesticide.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that up to 15 million acres of soybeans were damaged by dicamba drift in 2018 alone. Beekeepers in multiple states have reported sharp drops in honey production due to dicamba drift suppressing the flowering plants their bees need for sustenance. Dicamba’s damage to flowering plants was so severe that it forced Arkansas’ largest beekeeper to move his operation out of state.
In 2020 a federal court revoked the EPA's dicamba registration. In its decision the court noted that in approving dicamba, the agency had failed to examine how “dicamba use would tear the social fabric of farming communities.” Four months later the EPA nonetheless reapproved the pesticide, claiming new measures would cut down damage.
A 2021 EPA report found that restrictions to limit herbicide drift had failed and the pesticide was continuing to cause massive drift damage to crops and natural areas. In February 2024 a federal court banned the spraying of dicamba on Bayer’s dicamba- resistant crops a second time and outlined the EPA’s failure to consult victims of dicamba drift or any other stakeholder before the reapproval.
Today’s decision is unprecedented in that it substantially loosens even the weak restrictions the pesticide companies proposed when they applied for dicamba reapprovals in 2024. The weaker restrictions closely mirror the wish list included in comments to the agency from Kunkler’s former employer, the American Soybean Association.
The new standard allows year-round use and eliminates the proposed cutoff date of June 12 for dicamba application to soybeans. Restrictions on when spraying can occur during the day to reduce volatility have also been dropped. The EPA will no longer require review of tank mixes of pesticides with dicamba, even though dicamba pesticide mixtures often enhance dicamba’s volatility and drift damage.
Instead of calendar cutoff dates to prohibit applications in the heat of summer when drift and volatility is worse, the EPA has set temperature-based restrictions that require so-called “volatility reducing agents” on hotter days. Volatility reducing agents have failed to reduce dicamba volatility in the past. Applications would be prohibited at temperatures exceeding 95 degrees Fahrenheit, but it is unclear how this could be enforced.
Today’s approval maintains the same limited spray drift buffers that were ineffective in previous registrations of the pesticide. But in yet another action making this registration less protective than the prior ones that were struck down by courts, a volatility buffer intended to protect endangered species has been eliminated.
