EPA release and described strategy
On July 25, 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) released its draft Insecticide Strategy, which was open for public comment until September 23, 2024. The goal of the strategy is to limit insecticide exposure to the 850 endangered species listed by the Fish and Wildlife Service, by accounting for chemical properties and environmental factors that may put certain species or habitats at risk.
“Ensuring the safe use of insecticides is a critical part of EPA’s mission to protect endangered species and the environment,” said Deputy Assistant Administrator for Pesticide Programs for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention Jake Li. “This draft strategy is another major step in the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to protect endangered species, support farmers and other insecticide users, and provide critical environmental protections for communities across the country.”(1)
The release stated that the new draft Insecticide Strategy addresses the EPA’s deficiencies in fulfilling the obligations of the Endangered Species Act. The strategy is said to achieve this through an “efficient, effective and protective multichemical, multispecies approach.”(1) The EPA’s goal with this new strategy is to remove threats of litigation while decreasing product testing requirements on individual at-risk species.
“EPA’s decades-long approach of trying to meet these obligations chemical-by-chemical and species-by-species is slow and costly, resulting in litigation against the agency and uncertainty for farmers and other pesticide users about the continued availability of many pesticides. At the beginning of 2021, EPA faced nearly 20 lawsuits covering thousands of pesticide products due to its longstanding failure to meet ESA obligations for pesticides.”(1)
The plan comes on the heels of the draft herbicide strategy, which was first released in the summer of 2023 and finalized on August 30, 2024 (assessment of the initial draft herbicide strategy was addressed in the July/August 2023 Illinois Pesticide Review issue, “EPA releases draft herbicide strategy; public comment period open”). Developments in the herbicide strategy have been used to design the initial public draft of the insecticide strategy by following similar processes in gauging the threat of pesticides to a specific habitat where a species of interest lives, rather than species-specific testing.
The Draft Insecticide Strategy is laid out in the115-page document titled, “Draft Insecticide Strategy to Reduce Exposure of Federally Listed Endangered and Threatened Species and Designated Critical Habitats from the Use of Conventional Agricultural Insecticides,” and can be found in docket EPA-HQ-OPP-2024-0299. The strategy covers insecticides (including conventional, insect growth regulators, and miticides) for use in agricultural settings in the lower 48 United States through a three-pronged approach: “step 1. Identify potential for population-level impacts; step 2. Identify types of mitigation; step 3. Identify where mitigation applies.”(2) To summarize, the strategy aims to use our understanding of an insecticide’s off-target movement to establish use restrictions around identified susceptible ecosystems or “Pesticide Use Limitation Areas” (PULAs). Mitigations are based off of “more realistic and less conservative toxicity endpoints,”(2) with the intention for the EPA to “confidently identify when the uses of an insecticide have the potential for population-level impacts to listed species” (2), and to “identify effective and reasonable mitigations that are flexible and practical for growers.”(2)
Strategy assessment
After reading through the strategy and supporting documents, and attending explanatory seminars, I have many concerns over the EPA’s new draft Insecticide Strategy. I will do my best to explain a few of my concerns below.
Understanding: On paper, the individual concepts make some sense, however, when you tie all the pieces together, the strategy gets more and more muddled as the complexity increases. While the strategy is possible, the EPA is struggling to get its own employees up to speed on the strategies, let alone other state agricultural departments and stakeholders. Many state agricultural departments asked for the EPA to extend the September 23rd commenting period deadline due to the need for more time to grasp the concepts of the plan and to properly assess the extent of the strategy's impact on their state. Unfortunately, this request was denied.
Resources: While insecticide labeling will be updated to account for the new strategy, labels on pesticide containers will no longer be enough. Instead, the draft Insecticide Strategy proposes the use of QR codes that will direct you to a website with further information on the site conditions required for an insecticide to be applied. Additional documentation is going to cause a variety of issues for applicators, especially those applying in areas with little to no Wi-Fi or cell service.
Flexibility: The insecticide draft strategy touts itself as being flexible for the applicator, but in locations close to protected areas, this may not be the case. Many fields adjacent to these protected areas will most likely require increased border rows, which could prevent all insecticides from being applied or restrict them to such a small area within a field that the treatment will offer no measurable control.
Field/site-specific: The current draft proposes that mitigations will be field-specific. This requires that every field must be assessed individually to figure out how it will be impacted, and what can be applied. Field measurements and assessments will include soil type, gradation, local climate, pests, current and future crops, drainage, and irrigation. Additional mitigations may be required depending on a field's proximity to managed structures and habitats such as ponds, streams, and forests. While the field-specific mitigations allow for flexibility, making insecticide decisions in some areas may devolve into a process similar to filling out tax forms.
There is still some time before the Insecticide Strategy is finalized so hopefully some of these issues will be resolved. There is still little to no understanding of how this plan will be rolled out, how applicators will be brought up to speed, or how the strategy will be enforced. I expect some leniency when the strategy is first implemented as things get figured out.
Although the comment period has ended, you can read over 200 comments submitted on the docket and learn specific concerns that were shared with EPA from growers, university researchers, and industry groups. EPA is expected to update and finalize the Insecticide Strategy by early 2025.
References:
(1) EPA Releases Draft Strategy to Better Protect Endangered Species from Insecticides
(2) Draft Insecticide Strategy to Reduce Exposure of Federally Listed Endangered and Threatened Species and Designated Critical Habitats from the Use of Conventional Agricultural Insecticides
Pictured above: The American burying beetle is a threatened insect species previously found in Illinois, and was used by the EPA to help formulate spray drift mitigations for the draft Insecticide Strategy.
Photo credit: Joseph Berger, Bugwood.org
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Schepis provides subject matter expertise and training in pesticide safety with an emphasis on entomology.