WASHINGTON— The Environmental Protection Agency announced plans today to reapprove three formulations of the dangerous, drift-prone pesticide dicamba for use on genetically engineered cotton and soybeans.
Today’s announcement comes in spite of two different federal courts vacating the registrations of the weedkiller as a result of lawsuits filed against the EPA by the Center for Food Safety, the Center for Biological Diversity, the National Family Farm Coalition, and the Pesticide Action Network — once in 2020 and again in February 2024.
Dicamba drift has damaged millions of acres of soybeans and caused devastating damage to farms, home gardens, native plants and wildlife refuges throughout the Midwest and South. Experts have found dicamba drift damage to be the worst of any herbicide in the history of U.S. agriculture.
“EPA has had seven long years of massive drift damage to learn that dicamba cannot be used safely with GE dicamba-resistant crops," said Bill Freese, science director at Center for Food Safety. “If we allow these proposed decisions to go through, farmers and residents throughout rural America will again see their crops, trees and home gardens decimated by dicamba drift, and natural areas like wildlife refuges will also suffer. EPA must reverse course and withdraw its plans to reapprove this hazardous herbicide.”
The decision to seek reapproval comes less than a month 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. The ASA has been a vocal cheerleader for dicamba since its initial approval for use on soybeans in 2016, despite the fact that soybeans have been the most widely damaged crop. 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.
“Trump’s EPA is hitting new heights of absurdity by planning to greenlight a pesticide that’s caused the most extensive drift damage in U.S. agricultural history and twice been thrown out by federal courts,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This is what happens when pesticide oversight is controlled by industry lobbyists. Corporate fat cats get their payday and everyone else suffers the consequences.”
Today’s proposed decision would substantially loosen the already inadequate restrictions the companies themselves had proposed when they applied for dicamba reapprovals in 2024. It would allow year-round application and eliminate the proposed cutoff date of June 12 for dicamba application to soybeans. Long-standing time-of-day restrictions on spraying to reduce volatility have also been dropped.
Instead of timing restrictions, the EPA has instead proposed temperature cutoff restrictions that require so-called “volatility reducing agents” on hotter days, which have been used before and failed to reduce dicamba volatility. Applications would be prohibited in temperatures exceeding 95 degrees, but it is unclear how this could be enforced.
The EPA has also proposed to maintain the same limited drift buffers that were ineffective in previous registrations and reduced some of those buffers for endangered species. Widespread drift or volatility still remain a problem with new restrictions.
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. agriculture.
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 vacated the EPA's dicamba registration. In its decision, the court noted that in approving dicamba, the EPA had failed to examine how “dicamba use would tear the social fabric of farming communities.”
Four months later, the EPA reapproved the pesticide, claiming that new measures would cut down on the damage.
A 2021 EPA report stated that application restrictions to limit dicamba's harm had failed and the pesticide was continuing to cause massive drift damage to crops and natural areas. At that time the EPA admitted publicly it was not sure that dicamba’s continued registration complied with requirements to protect the environment, but did not cancel the approval.
In February 2024 a federal court again vacated the EPA's 2020 reapproval of dicamba as unlawful and outlined the massive damage to stakeholders.
The EPA’s decision to seek reapproval of dicamba runs counter to the recent report by the Make America Healthy Again Commission, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., linking pesticides and health risks like cancer and other diseases — especially in children.
Last week, it was reported that the Trump administration indicated it will not pursue new restrictions on pesticide use despite the report’s findings and MAHA’s renewed scrutiny of pesticides, furthering the Trump administration’s policies benefitting multinational pesticide companies over small and family farmers, human health, and the environment.
