#pesticide regulations

[farmerstrend]

Kenya’s New Strategy to Eliminate Harmful Pesticides from the Market

Kenya’s new plan to phase out harmful pesticides aims to create a safer agriculture sector, protect public health, and promote sustainable farming practices. Discover how Kenya is taking action to withdraw dangerous pesticides from the market, ensuring safer food production and environmental protection. Kenya develops a comprehensive strategy to eliminate toxic pesticides, prioritizing the safety…

[dragonomatopoeia]

madelyn very considerately built time into our recording schedule for 'this segment of the recap will probably launch air straight into a five minute digression about labor protections and immigrants' rights' and i am running a mile with the inch she's given me. i'm so sorry madelyn. i have thoughts. and opinions. and sources.

[seriousbusinessforhumans]

Mon 24 Apr 2023

The US Environmental Protection Agency has in effect ignored a 2020 federal court order prohibiting the use of Monsanto and other producers’ toxic dicamba-based herbicides that are destroying millions of acres of cropland, harming endangered species and increasing cancer risks for farmers, new fillings in the lawsuit charge.

Instead of permanently yanking the products from the market after the 2020 order, the EPA only required industry to add further application instructions to the herbicides’ labels before reapproving the products.

A late 2021 EPA investigation found the same problems persist even with new directions added to the label, but the agency still allows Monsanto, BASF and other producers to continue using dicamba.

[barstoolblues]

if you type the word pesticide on this site there should be a mandatory “YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO SCIENCE DENIAL BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE IN CLIMATE CHANGE” pop up that you cant get rid of

[suicidepreventionday]

Preventing suicide by phasing out highly hazardous pesticides.

Self-poisoning with pesticides is among the most common means of suicide worldwide, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs) are readily available. Multi-sectoral action is needed to phase out the use of HHPs to prevent suicide and other related issues of public health and environmental concern. This brochure aims to provide a brief overview of the issue of HHPs and approaches to phasing out HHPs to save lives, particularly suicides. It has been designed for a broad audience, including policy-makers (e.g. health, agriculture, and environment), pesticide regulators, local health and agricultural services, civil society organizations, academics, as well as the general public. It draws on the 2023 WHO/FAO Guidance on use of pesticide regulation to prevent suicide and the 2019 WHO/FAO publication. Preventing suicide: a resource for pesticide registrars and regulators

[safeday]

Examples of legislation addressing the combined risks of agro-chemical exposure with excessive heat.

Costa Rica: Decree N° 33507-MTSS Occupational Health Regulations in the management and the use of chemicals.

[toast1862]

man i was so excited about shigemoto being taken out of the picture and kana getting to be in charge. it seemed like such a great way to shift the focus and bring the actual magical girls into the larger political plot. but the next arc was entirely about getting shigemoto back, and it felt so rushed. like the author just could not stand having the real main character offscreen for too long. kana didn't even come up with the plan. some random guy who showed up just to have a man in the room making decisions did. why was he even added to the story except to take focus away. it just completely broke any illusion for me that the magical girls were important to the story as a whole.

and i like the story! it's kind of a sci fi political thriller with corporate maneuvering and conflicting incentives and a vicious cycle where the problems get bigger and the only solutions allowed to exist under capitalism are to do MORE, causing the problems to get worse, rather than cutting back and tailoring solutions to the problem. yknow, like throwing broad spectrum antibiotics at everything, causing antibioitic-resistant diseases, and developing stronger antibiotics to deal with it, etc etc. or herbicides or pesticides or even like. saving the environment. reduce your ecological footprint by buying this recycled product that we started a factory to produce, instead of buying less. but it's magical girls instead. like it's an interesting story!!!! but women don't get to participate in it

[systlin]

See attacking Iowa for its lack of hills is so dumb when the crazy amount of pesticide use and its influence on less regulations in environmental policy is right there (no hate to you)

No no, you're right.

But we DO have the Titty Out Civil War Union monument, so there are good aspects

[undergroundusa]

SHARE & EDUCATE

[medicaldevicesindustrynews]

Cultivating Sustainable Agriculture: Exploring the Agrochemical Market

The global agrochemicals market is projected to be worth USD 301.5 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 3.9%, according to P&S Intelligence. This development can be credited to the growing populace, which is propelling the need for food. Because of this, the demand for fertilizers among the agrarian community is growing in order to produce a higher volume of nutritious crops. Growing Demand for…

[feather-bone]

[ID: a digital drawing of a bald eagle facing forward, perched on a branch with a fish in its talons. It is on a colorful background reminiscent of pixels. End.]

Bald eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus

Once on the brink of extinction with 417 nesting pairs in 1963, they bounced back after significant conservation efforts and a federal regulation of an environmentally harmful pesticide. In 2019 the population was around 316,700 individuals. The United States has elected a guy who wants to gut federal regulations in the name of "efficiency", but federal environmental protections like the ban on DDT are in place for a reason!!!

Their species name leucocephalus means "white head"! Juvenile eagles are brown all over - it takes a few years to start developing their iconic adult plumage.

I love these guys but wanted to be very particular about avoiding a patriotic vibe in their drawing, so I hope you enjoy the technicolor light show background. B-)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Expert agencies and elected legislatures

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

Since Trump hijacked the Supreme Court, his backers have achieved many of their policy priorities: legalizing bribery, formalizing forced birth, and – with the Loper Bright case, neutering the expert agencies that regulate business:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/scotus-decisions-chevron-immunity-loper

What the Supreme Court began, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now poised to finish, through the "Department of Government Efficiency," a fake agency whose acronym ("DOGE") continues Musk's long-running cryptocurrency memecoin pump-and-dump. The new department is absurd – imagine a department devoted to "efficiency" with two co-equal leaders who are both famously incapable of getting along with anyone – but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.

Expert agencies are often all that stands between us and extreme misadventure, even death. The modern world is full of modern questions, the kinds of questions that require a high degree of expert knowledge to answer, but also the kinds of questions whose answers you'd better get right.

You're not stupid, nor are you foolish. You could go and learn everything you need to know to evaluate the firmware on your antilock brakes and decide whether to trust them. You could figure out how to assess the Common Core curriculum for pedagogical soundness. You could learn the material science needed to evaluate the soundness of the joists that hold the roof up over your head. You could acquire the biology and chemistry chops to decide whether you want to trust produce that's been treated with Monsanto's Roundup pesticides. You could do the same for cell biology, virology, and epidemiology and decide whether to wear a mask and/or get an MRNA vaccine and/or buy a HEPA filter.

You could do any of these. You might even be able to do two or three of them. But you can't do all of them, and that list is just a small slice of all the highly technical questions that stand between you and misery or an early grave. Practically speaking, you aren't going to develop your own robust meatpacking hygiene standards, nor your own water treatment program, nor your own Boeing 737 MAX inspection protocol.

Markets don't solve this either. If they did, we wouldn't have to worry about chunks of Boeing jets falling on our heads. The reason we have agencies like the FDA (and enabling legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act) is that markets failed to keep people from being murdered by profit-seeking snake-oil salesmen and radium suppository peddlers.

These vital questions need to be answered by experts, but that's easier said than done. After all, experts disagree about this stuff. Shortcuts for evaluating these disagreements ("distrust any expert whose employer has a stake in a technical question") are crude and often lead you astray. If you dismiss any expert employed by a firm that wants to bring a new product to market, you will lose out on the expertise of people who are so legitimately excited about the potential improvements of an idea that they quit their jobs and go to work for whomever has the best chance of realizing a product based on it. Sure, that doctor who works for a company with a new cancer cure might just be shilling for a big bonus – but maybe they joined the company because they have an informed, truthful belief that the new drug might really cure cancer.

What's more, the scientific method itself speaks against the idea of there being one, permanent answer to any big question. The method is designed as a process of continual refinement, where new evidence is continuously brought forward and evaluated, and where cherished ideas that are invalidated by new evidence are discarded and replaced with new ideas.

So how are we to survive and thrive in a world of questions we ourselves can't answer, that experts disagree about, and whose answers are only ever provisional?

The scientific method has an answer for this, too: refereed, adversarial peer review. The editors of major journals act as umpires in disputes among experts, exercising their editorial discernment to decide which questions are sufficiently in flux as to warrant taking up, then asking parties who disagree with a novel idea to do their damndest to punch holes in it. This process is by no means perfect, but, like democracy, it's the worst form of knowledge creation except for all others which have been tried.

Expert regulators bring this method to governance. They seek comment on technical matters of public concern, propose regulations based on them, invite all parties to comment on these regulations, weigh the evidence, and then pass a rule. This doesn't always get it right, but when it does work, your medicine doesn't poison you, the bridge doesn't collapse as you drive over it, and your airplane doesn't fall out of the sky.

Expert regulators work with legislators to provide an empirical basis for turning political choices into empirically grounded policies. Think of all the times you've heard about how the gerontocracy that dominates the House and the Senate is incapable of making good internet policy because "they're out of touch and don't understand technology." Even if this is true (and sometimes it is, as when Sen Ted Stevens ranted about the internet being "a series of tubes," not "a dump truck"), that doesn't mean that Congress can't make good internet policy.

After all, most Americans can safely drink their tap water, a novelty in human civilization, whose history amounts to short periods of thriving shattered at regular intervals by water-borne plagues. The fact that most of us can safely drink our water, but people who live in Flint (or remote indigenous reservations, or Louisiana's Cancer Alley) can't tells you that these neighbors of ours are being deliberately poisoned, as we know precisely how not to poison them.

How did we (most of us) get to the point where we can drink the water without shitting our guts out? It wasn't because we elected a bunch of water scientists! I don't know the precise number of microbiologists and water experts who've been elected to either house, but it's very small, and their contribution to good sanitation policy is negligible.

We got there by delegating these decisions to expert agencies. Congress formulates a political policy ("make the water safe") and the expert agency turns that policy into a technical program of regulation and enforcement, and your children live to drink another glass of water tomorrow.

Musk and Ramaswamy have set out to destroy this process. In their Wall Street Journal editorial, they explain that expert regulation is "undemocratic" because experts aren't elected:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/musk-and-ramaswamy-the-doge-plan-to-reform-government-supreme-court-guidance-end-executive-power-grab-fa51c020

They've vowed to remove "thousands" of regulations, and to fire swathes of federal employees who are in charge of enforcing whatever remains:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/20/24301975/elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-doge-plan

And all this is meant to take place on an accelerated timeline, between now and July 4, 2026 – a timeline that precludes any meaningful assessment of the likely consequences of abolishing the regulations they'll get rid of.

"Chesterton's Fence" – a thought experiment from the novelist GK Chesterton – is instructive here:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

A regulation that works might well produce no visible sign that it's working. If your water purification system works, everything is fine. It's only when you get rid of the sanitation system that you discover why it was there in the first place, a realization that might well arrive as you expire in a slick of watery stool with a rectum so prolapsed the survivors can use it as a handle when they drag your corpse to the mass burial pits.

When Musk and Ramaswamy decry the influence of "unelected bureaucrats" on your life as "undemocratic," they sound reasonable. If unelected bureaucrats were permitted to set policy without democratic instruction or oversight, that would be autocracy.

Indeed, it would resemble life on the Tesla factory floor: that most autocratic of institutions, where you are at the mercy of the unelected and unqualified CEO of Tesla, who holds the purely ceremonial title of "Chief Engineer" and who paid the company's true founders to falsely describe him as its founder.

But that's not how it works! At its best, expert regulations turns political choices in to policy that reflects the will of democratically accountable, elected representatives. Sometimes this fails, and when it does, the answer is to fix the system – not abolish it.

I have a favorite example of this politics/empiricism fusion. It comes from the UK, where, in 2008, the eminent psychopharmacologist David Nutt was appointed as the "drug czar" to the government. Parliament had determined to overhaul its system of drug classification, and they wanted expert advice:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

To provide this advice, Nutt convened a panel of drug experts from different disciplines and asked them to rate each drug in question on how dangerous it was for its user; for its user's family; and for broader society. These rankings were averaged, and then a statistical model was used to determine which drugs were always very dangerous, no matter which group's safety you prioritized, and which drugs were never very dangerous, no matter which group you prioritized.

Empirically, the "always dangerous" drugs should be in the most restricted category. The "never very dangerous" drugs should be at the other end of the scale. Parliament had asked how to rank drugs by their danger, and for these categories, there were clear, factual answers to Parliament's question.

But there were many drugs that didn't always belong in either category: drugs whose danger score changed dramatically based on whether you were more concerned about individual harms, familial harms, or societal harms. This prioritization has no empirical basis: it's a purely political question.

So Nutt and his panel said to Parliament, "Tell us which of these priorities matter the most to you, and we will tell you where these changeable drugs belong in your schedule of restricted substances." In other words, politicians make political determinations, and then experts turn those choices into empirically supported policies.

This is how policy by "unelected bureaucrats" can still be "democratic."

But the Nutt story doesn't end there. Nutt butted heads with politicians, who kept insisting that he retract factual, evidence-supported statements (like "alcohol is more harmful than cannabis"). Nutt refused to do so. It wasn't that he was telling politicians which decisions to make, but he took it as his duty to point out when those decisions did not reflect the policies they were said to be in support of. Eventually, Nutt was fired for his commitment to empirical truth. The UK press dubbed this "The Nutt Sack Affair" and you can read all about it in Nutt's superb book Drugs Without the Hot Air, an indispensable primer on the drug war and its many harms:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/drugs-without-the-hot-air-9780857844989/

Congress can't make these decisions. We don't elect enough water experts, virologists, geologists, oncology researchers, structural engineers, aerospace safety experts, pedagogists, gerontoloists, physicists and other experts for Congress to turn its political choices into policy. Mostly, we elect lawyers. Lawyers can do many things, but if you ask a lawyer to tell you how to make your drinking water safe, you will likely die a horrible death.

That's the point. The idea that we should just trust the market to figure this out, or that all regulation should be expressly written into law, is just a way of saying, "you will likely die a horrible death."

Trump – and his hatchet men Musk and Ramaswamy – are not setting out to create evidence-based policy. They are pursuing policy-based evidence, firing everyone capable of telling them how to turn the values espouse (prosperity and safety for all Americans) into policy.

They dress this up in the language of democracy, but the destruction of the expert agencies that turn the political will of our representatives into our daily lives is anything but democratic. It's a prelude to transforming the nation into a land of epistemological chaos, where you never know what's coming out of your faucet.

[probablyasocialecologist]

RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau has shown for the first time, in a joint study with BOKU University, that permaculture brings about a significant improvement in biodiversity, soil quality and carbon storage. In view of the challenges of climate change and species extinction, this type of agriculture proved to be a real alternative to conventional cultivation—and reconcile environmental protection and high yields. Permaculture uses natural cycles and ecosystems as blueprint. Food is produced in an agricultural ecosystem that is as self-regulating, natural and diverse as possible. For example, livestock farming is integrated into the cultivation of crops or the diversity of beneficial organisms is promoted in order to avoid the use of mineral fertilizers or pesticides. In a study, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, researchers from RPTU and BOKU have now, for the first time, comprehensively investigated the effects of this planning and management concept on the environment.

[...]

"Permaculture appears to be a much more ecologically sustainable alternative to industrial agriculture," said Julius Reiff . At the same time, the yields from permaculture are comparable to those of industrial agriculture, as the researchers' not yet published data shows. "In view of the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, the observed improvements would represent a real turnaround when applied to larger areas," says ecosystem analysis expert Martin Entling from RPTU.

4 July 2024

[theambitiouswoman]

Benefits of apple cider vinegar 🍏✨

• Skin toner: Clears & balances

• pH balance: Supports vaginal health in a diluted bath

• Face masks: Adds glow & fights acne

• Hair rinse: Boosts shine & reduces dandruff

• Salad dressing: Adds flavor & aids digestion

• Cleaning: Natural disinfectant

• Fruit & veggie wash: Removes dirt & pesticides

• Immune boost: Rich in antioxidants & antimicrobial

• Digestive aid: Supports gut health when taken diluted

• Appetite control: May help curb cravings

• Blood sugar balance: Helps regulate levels

• Sore throat relief: Mix with warm water to soothe

• Foot soak: Softens skin & fights odor

• Sunburn relief: Calms redness when diluted

[she-is-ovarit]

Heads up for those of you who don't know this. Heavy metals such as arsenic and lead were found in popular protein powder brands, and 55% of the brands tested contained BPA pesticides, and other contaminants (over 150 contaminants in all!!!).

Plant based protein powders had the highest amounts of contamination in comparison to whey or egg based protein powders—it's assumed that this is because the plants directly bioabsorb the contaminants whereas the digestive system of animals might reduce it a little. More specifically, they had higher levels of heavy metals.

It didn't matter whether the product was marked as organic or not. Organic products actually had higher concentrations of heavy metals than non organic protein powders.

The most contaminated products were Garden of Life, Nature's Best, Quest, 360Cut, and Vega. Only Garden of Life responded when the researchers reached out, and their response was declining to comment.

Also, as this article describes, like protein powders even FDA approved supplements are loosely regulated. There really isn't enforcement on the manufacturing processes or what goes into these products. The manufacturers aren't required to prove they're safe. This is important to know considering some manufacturers of protein powders also make vegan and vegetarian supplements.

[bogleech]

With most insects and things I can understand that they have a place in the ecosystem, but I have trouble understanding the same thing with bed bugs. Are they just like. Kind of domesticated ticks? How did they end up almost solely indoors (to my understanding)? I had them in my apartment a while back and it was a pretty traumatizing experience. I know they don’t carry diseases like mosquitos and are really more mentally/emotionally harmful than physically harmful.

I saw your post about how we should be thankful the world isn’t so sterile that there’s no living thing left to harm or inconvenience us. And I do agree! But I think bedbugs are the one thing that I have trouble fully grasping that concept with. It’s harder to see the bigger picture with something that occurs in such a small and personal space, I suppose.

I can't find the post where I launched into this before but tiny bloodsucking animals ("micropredator" is growing as the preferred term over lumping them in with "parasites" per se!) exert a lot of important pressures on their host animals; everyone knows predators change how animals eat, sleep, mate, nest together and migrate, but so do the things that just "annoy" them, like having fleas! Additionally "micropredators" work together with predators and diseases in regulating population balance, and by taking nutrients non-lethally from their hosts, they help redistribute energy back into circulation! A little flea or tick or bed bug collects a little blood protein from a bear, it gets eaten by a spider or it dies and rots, and now that bear's protein energy is back in the food web well before the bear has passed on! All throughout that bear's life, its blood is "becoming" all these little pesky bugs that then become food for other things! When it comes to bed bugs, which are closely related to stinkbugs, assassin bugs, aphids and other "true bugs," they adapted to live in bird's nests, bat caves, rodent dents, anywhere juice-filled vertebrates come home to and rest, and the ones that feed on us are so closely related to a bat-specialized species you can only barely tell them apart:

The "bat bug," however, can't utilize human blood well enough to maintain an infestation on human hosts alone! They fully require bats!

We aren't sure when some bat bugs branched off and started traveling with humans, but we do know that they used to be MUCH MUCH EASIER to deal with. Perfectly ordinary pesticides used to clear up a bed bug problem just fine. That changed when we invented DDT and tried to use it to wipe them out altogether. It's one of the harshest synthetic poisons ever developed, and it kills through just an ion channel in the animal's nervous system. By drenching North America in DDT for years on end, we "seemingly" wiped out bed bugs and a few other things, but really all we did was give a few generations of human beings a bunch of new chronic illnesses and give a few generations of insects a mutation that makes them resistant to not just DDT but lots and lots of other poisons.

Bed bugs basically destroy people's lives but never naturally evolved to be that good at it; it's just another result of capitalism ignoring the warnings of the scientific community. People died rich off DDT before they ever had to care about its after effects.