"So what they do is put a call out, and everyone who has data submits it. So what the EPA gets is a flood of papers; [EPA officials] count how many studies support the data, and how many don't," Hayes says. "The only problem is that they are way more flooded with dead animals and contaminated controls than with real studies."
EPA officials say the risk review process is far more complicated and stringent than Hayes suggests. As EPA spokesman Dave Deegan explains, "These decisions, they go through a rigorous, science-based process. ... It is a gargantuan amount of information that we look at. Unfortunately, all data is not conclusive; that's why we look at the weight of the evidence." Still, Karen Heisler, head of the EPA's Agricultural Initiative, a regional program that works to make the EPA's agricultural and environmental regulations a cohesive whole, acknowledges that when she tried to act as a liaison between the media and EPA staffers, few of the staffers were willing to talk to SF Weekly about the process that reauthorized use of the chemical.
Paolo Vescia
Paolo Vescia
UC professor Tyrone Hayes.
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Last June, atrazine was reviewed by the EPA and by a scientific advisory panel composed of scientists from outside the agency. Seventeen atrazine studies were presented for review. Twelve of these studies were submitted by Syngenta, and three were from Hayes. The other two studies came from independent researchers, Heisler says. In this case, it seems, the scientific advisory panel and the EPA felt that the weight of the evidence supported continued use of atrazine. In this case, it also seems, the EPA was not overly concerned about apparent conflicts of interest. More than two-thirds of the studies supporting atrazine were provided by Syngenta, the company that manufactures it, and the advisory panel that helped conduct the risk review included Ronald Kendall, the Texas Tech scientist who had led Syngenta-funded research into atrazine's risks.
Hayes believes the EPA's risk review process, which not only allows but requires companies to study the dangers of their own often highly profitable products, leads, inherently, to biased results. "There has to be some way to police what the company is doing," he says. "If the company is required to study the safety of its own product, no one else is going to do it."
Seven countries in the European Union -- France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Austria, and Italy -- have banned atrazine. These countries have a policy of banning pesticides that occur in drinking water at levels higher than 0.1 parts per billion.
After the initial phase of an ongoing review in the United States, and even though it did not take atrazine off the market, the EPA did recently acknowledge that "there is sufficient evidence to conclude that atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs." There apparently is not enough evidence, however, to stop farmers from dumping 80 million pounds of atrazine per year on U.S. farms.
And, actually, Tyrone Hayes is not attempting to have atrazine banned from use. He is, he says, just trying to protect the scientific process from being perverted by those with huge financial incentives to do so. If banning atrazine (or some other pesticide) would cost the manufacturer too much money for regulators to contemplate, Hayes says, then regulators should feel free to leave the pesticide on the market -- if they explain that the reason for doing so is financial, rather than scientific. "Atrazine is not going to go away," says Hayes. "What I would like to see is, I would like to see honesty. Atrazine earns $500 to $800 million per year, and it increases corn yield by only 1.2 percent. We need to acknowledge that it makes a lot of money, and we can't afford to take atrazine off the market.
"It's that simple."
Alison Pierce is an associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting.
