THE ONE-MINUTE ACTIVIST
This month we ask the USDA to continue NASS’s Agricultural Chemical Usage reports, important reporting and research on agricultural chemical use in the United States.
July, 2008
Secretary Ed Schafer
U.S. Department of Agriculture
1400 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington, DC 20250.Secretary Schafer,
I am extremely concerned about the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) announcement to eliminate reporting and research on agricultural chemical use in the United States. NASS has proven extremely important to monitor agricultural chemical use.
NASS’s Agricultural Chemical Usage reports are the only reliable, publicly available source of data on pesticide and fertilizer use outside of California. Elimination of this program will severely hamper the efforts of the USDA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), land grant scientists, and state officials to perform pesticide risk assessments and make informed policy decisions on pesticide use. In particular, USDA and EPA will have difficulty tracking their progress in meeting their policy commitments to reduce the use of hazardous pesticides through adoption of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practices and to support IPM research.
Please add my concern to the letters to you which have been signed by the various groups who rely on the USDA's information, including public interest groups such as Greenpeace, National Resources Defense Council, the Organic Center and the World Wildlife Fund, and industry groups such as Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc., Del Monte Foods and the American Soybean Association.
"It is almost unprecedented to have these diverse interests and stakeholders be on the same side of the issue, including the EPA and federal agencies," said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the NRDC. It is interesting to note the one big name conspicuously absent from these signatories: Monsanto.
I urge you to restore NASS’s capacity to provide regular and frequent reports on the use of agricultural chemicals in U.S. agriculture. Specifically, I request that NASS reinstate its program of the 1990s, which involved surveys of chemical use annually on major field crops (corn, soybeans and cotton); periodically on other field crops; and biennially on fruit and vegetable crops.I thank you for your time and eagerly await your response.
Thanks to the Organic Consumers Assn.
