U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan urging the agency to reject the applications seeking to reapprove the controversial herbicide dicamba. In the letter, Senator Booker and his colleagues Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Senator Peter Welch (D-VT), pointed to dicamba’s ongoing and widespread damage to wild plant species and farmers’ crops caused by dicamba’s volatility, and how current EPA restrictions have failed to stop these problems.
“Since their original two-year experimental approval in 2016, dicamba herbicides sprayed ‘over the-top’ (OTT) of soybeans and cotton genetically engineered to withstand them have drifted rampantly, damaging many millions of acres of sensitive crops. Dicamba is notorious for its volatility, which enables it to drift hundreds of yards to over a mile, causing fencerow-to- fencerow crop injury,” the Senators wrote.
A 2020 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the EPA’s approval of dicamba was unlawful, underscoring the "enormous and unprecedented damage" caused by the herbicide. Since then, multiple courts, including a recent ruling in 2024, have once again determined that the herbicide's approval violated federal law.
“The same companies that manufacture dicamba have again applied for re-registration this year. Nearly every year since 2016, EPA has made multiple attempts to mitigate this damage through imposing progressively tighter usage restrictions, but these efforts have failed. It is now abundantly clear that dicamba cannot be ‘fixed.’ A few tweaks on the proposed labels will not solve the drift threats these products pose any more than prior restrictions did,” the Senators continued.
“For all these reasons and to avoid irreparable harm to U.S. farmers, we therefore urge EPA to reject the 2024 pending applications and not again make the mistake of approving dicamba products for this use,” the Senators concluded.
The letter is cosigned by U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Peter Welch (D-VT).
Source : senate.gov