WASHINGTON— The Center for Biological Diversity sent a petition today urging President Trump, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency to eliminate the use of extraordinarily toxic pesticides on U.S. food.

Secretary Kennedy has repeatedly stated that many of the most-used pesticides in the United States are “extraordinarily toxic,” including atrazine, neonicotinoids, glyphosate and organophosphates. He has warned that pesticides — many of which have scientifically well-documented links to cancer, infertility, obesity and developmental disorders — are significant contributors to chronic health problems faced by people across the nation.

“We’re calling on President Trump and Secretary Kennedy to Make America Healthy Again by taking extraordinarily toxic pesticides out of our food,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center. “It’s outrageous that giant corporations like atrazine-maker ChemChina are allowed to profit from billions in sales while contaminating our food and waterways with extraordinarily toxic pesticides. The good news is that this ever-worsening problem can be fixed. Our petition offers the new administration a blueprint of common-sense actions it can take right now to decontaminate our pesticide-drenched food supply.”

Following his reelection Trump expressed his own concerns that the United States continues spending “billions and billions of dollars on pesticides,” compared to the European Union and yet has far worse health outcomes. He pledged that his administration would “ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, [and] pesticides.” As part of that pledge, he nominated Kennedy as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services with a mandate to “go wild on the food.”

Trump stated recently that Kennedy is “looking into [pesticides] very seriously because maybe it's not necessary to use all of that.”

Last week Trump signed an executive order establishing the “Make America Healthy Again” commission, chaired by Kennedy, to “assess the threat that potential over-utilization of…certain chemicals, and certain other exposures pose to children” with a particular focus on “environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety.”

The Center’s petition calls for:

• The Food and Drug Administration to set up a comprehensive and mandatory enforcement framework that protects Americans from imported food contaminated by dangerous pesticides.
• The EPA to ban use of extraordinarily toxic pesticides on food crops.
• The USDA to condition farm subsidies on eliminating use of extraordinarily toxic pesticide on food crops.
• Health and Human Services and USDA to include clear language in the next Dietary Guidelines for Americans to avoid foods contaminated with harmful pesticides.

The petition does not seek additional restrictions on the use of any pesticides on major commodity crops that are grown for animal feed or for use as biofuels.

In particular, the petition echoes both Trump’s and Kennedy’s concerns that numerous pesticides continue to be used in the United States that are banned in many other nations due to their strong links to human health harms. For example, China is one of 70 nations that have banned the extraordinarily toxic pesticide paraquat, associated with Parkinson’s disease and childhood leukemia; but its state-owned ChemChina continues to sell paraquat in the United States, where millions of pounds are used every year on crops like citrus, almonds, artichokes, garlic, pears, strawberries and grapes.

Over one-quarter of pesticides use today in the United States is of chemicals banned in the European Union, Brazil and China. The petition further seeks to ensure that imported foods are not contaminated with U.S.-banned pesticides that make it to U.S. markets due to lax and inadequate federal inspection and penalty regimes. Currently foreign food imports account for the majority of pesticide-contamination violations detected by federal agencies, and the number of annual violations has not decreased in the past 10 years.

“President Trump should put an end to foreign corporations taking advantage of our lax pesticide laws to bolster their profits at the expense of our health,” said Burd. “Democratic and Republican administrations alike have been too timid to take on powerful agribusiness interests in the past, but we hope this administration will have the courage to put a stop to this mass poisoning and put America on a path to better health.”