#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.

[thoughtlessarse]

The former president’s crude appeals to masculinity culture clash with his lax approach toward PFAS and pesticides, which have been linked to lowered testosterone and sperm count. This month, the U.S. Air Force made a surprise announcement that it is refusing to comply with an order to clean up drinking water that it contaminated with PFAS “forever chemicals”—substances that have been linked to hormone disruption, liver damage, and a range of other health problems. The rationale for halting the cleanup was this year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine, in which courts typically deferred to the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies’ authority to interpret and enforce environmental and consumer safety rules. Overturning Chevron was one of the most consequential moves that former President Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees have made to date. But there’s now strong evidence that the former president would go further than his own justices in a second term, giving industry a freer hand to pollute with PFAS, pesticides, microplastics, and other toxic substances that have been shown to have, among other severe health effects, significant negative impacts on male fertility. Trump is positioning himself as the candidate of unbridled masculinity. He’s depending on strong electoral support from young men. The former president sauntered into the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to the tune of “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and accepted the nomination following a speech in which Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt and declared him a “gladiator.” J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has cited falling fertility rates as an existential threat to the nation’s future. Yet—in the name of reducing bureaucratic red tape—Trump is proposing to deregulate substances that could make it harder to conceive children and could cause Americans’ testosterone levels to plummet. In seeking to shrink the administrative state, Trump could also shrink the testicles of American men. 

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On par for the anti-science folks. And some of them want to ban IVF, because real babies can only be conceived by a man dominating a woman or some such illogical shit. The Master Race, indeed.

[eurofinsadvinus]

Our team will be present at the Asian Chemical Forum (ACF) - 5-6 September 2023. If you will be at the conference, do connect with us. We look forward to the opportunity to understand your requirements and help you in building a safer chemical future! Email us at 📧 bd@advinus.com to schedule a meeting. Eurofins Advinus Agrosciences India offers comprehensive product development services to support your global registration needs. Our team has expertise to assess and prove the safety of your products as per requirements of all international guidelines (OECD, EPA, CIPAC, JMAFF, ICH, SANCO, ABNT etc.) To know more about our services, click on the link - 👉 

Agrochemical Development Services

[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

[one-hell-of-a-sheep]

How is everyone here totally missing that wolves were in fact hunted to local extinction across huge swathes of the USA in order to protect livestock species? And that the US government still uses cyanide bombs, endangering people and pets, to target large predators for that same reason? Have some perspective here—y’all are not better, you’ve just had less time and a larger area of land to beat into submission. The culture around large predator conservation is shifting in both countries, but American livestock farmers are on the exact same side as English sport hunters. Given a button to irrevocably exterminate large predators, neither one would hesitate to push it.

Actually your society is the freaks for shooting everything that moves and burning half your "nature reserves" every year so that upperclass dandies can eat leaded pheasant. North Americans are the well adjusted ones here, your country has become a desolate suburban lawn in island form

[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

[headspace-hotel]

USAmericans

Read the Project 2025 manifesto RIGHT NOW

It's MUCH worse than y'all have been hearing

There is so much here you'll have to look at it for yourself, but the climate policy alone is nightmare fuel.

The republican coalition wants to essentially end funding for green energy, dramatically promote and expand fossil fuel industries, and eliminate funding and regulations in all sectors promoting climate change mitigation. Task forces and offices related to clean energy and lowering carbon emissions will be eliminated and replaced with offices for promoting fossil fuels.

They want to LOG NATIONAL FORESTS TO "THIN" THE TREES TO STOP WILDFIRES.

THEY WANT TO FORCE OREGON AND CALIFORNIA TO LOG THEIR NATIONAL FORESTS AND TREAT THEM AS FOR TIMBER PRODUCTION

There are specific provisions in Project 2025 to essentially destroy the Endangered Species Act, causing it to defer to the rights of "economic development" and "private property." The plan includes delisting gray wolves, cutting the budget so that a "triage" system is used to determine which species will get protection, removing funding for research, removing experts and specialists from the decision-making process, and preventing "experimental" populations of animals from being established.

This is so much worse than I expected it to be and there's much more past that: They want to deregulate pesticides and remove much of the EPA's ability to regulate pollutants as well.

Also included in the manifesto is that we should

withdraw from nuclear weapons nonproliferation agreements, build more nuclear weapons, and resume nuclear weapons testing

The manifesto comprehensively outlines the scorched-earth elimination of abortion access, down to ensuring doctors aren't even trained to perform abortions. There are plans in here to disrupt abortion access GLOBALLY, not just domestically.

Not only that,the Republicans plan on reframing family planning programs around "fertility awareness" and "holistic family planning."

I can't even describe it all. I'm trying to give screenshots of the most important things but there's so much.

The foreign policy is a nightmare. They plan to push fossil fuels onto the Global South and promote the development of fossil fuel industry in the "developing world."

It is aggressive and antagonistic towards other nations, strongly pro-military, proposing that we INCREASE (!!!!!) defense spending, improve public opinion of the military and military recruitment, and increase the power to fund new weapons technology.

Just read the Department of Defense section. It's about greatly increasing and strengthening the military-industrial complex, collaborating more closely with weapons manufacturers, removing regulatory barriers to arming our allies and to inventing new military weapons, and recruiting more people into the military. They include provisions to develop AI technology for surveillance. And of course, continuing to support Israel is in there.

Elsewhere it proposes interfering in foreign countries with creepy pro-USA propaganda campaigns, even establishing international educational programs where faculty have to pledge to promote USA interests.

There's a line in here about getting rid of PBS because SESAME STREET is LEFTIST for God's sake.

HOW are people claiming democrats have the same policies. I feel like i'm losing my mind.

[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

[thoughtlessarse]

In Charente-Maritime, France, rising child cancer cases are suspected to be linked to pesticide exposure. Local residents are pushing for stricter national and EU regulations on pesticide use. They are invisible, but traces of them can be found everywhere: in our food, in plants, in the soil, in groundwater, in the air and in our bodies. These are pesticide residues. Europe is one of the world’s biggest consumers of them, and the leading exporter. The risks they pose to the environment, and to animal and human health, are at the heart of a vigorous debate, particularly as regards their intensive use in the agricultural sector. The European Union was planning to halve its use of them within a few years. Yet it recently dropped this target under pressure from farmers and agrochemical lobbies. Europeans’ Stories takes you to Charente Maritime, in the west of France. This department is home to a vast cereal-growing plain that consumes a lot of pesticides. Residents of several municipalities in the region have sounded the alarm: cases of child cancer, some of which have resulted in death, have multiplied in recent years. This situation gives Franck Rinchet-Girollet every cause for concern. His 7-year-old son is in remission from bone cancer, diagnosed 5 years ago. This former bus driver, now a parliamentary attaché, is Co-Chairman of the association Avenir Santé Environnement (Future Health Environment) set up by local residents who, like him, are fighting to find the cause of their children’s cancers. “The reference air quality sensor in the area recorded 33 pesticides in 2019, 41 pesticides in 2021, and the French record for herbicides,” he says.

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[undergroundusa]

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[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…

[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.