Scholars argue that regulators have failed to protect child health under pesticide control law.
Over sixty years ago, environmental activist Rachel Carson called pesticides used on food crops “elixirs of death.” Experts have linked exposure to pesticides to severe health conditions, including cancer and diabetes, and have warned that children are especially vulnerable to these consequences.
The U.S. Congress sought to protect children from pesticides by enacting the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 (FQPA), which directs the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit children’s exposure to pesticides found in foods.
In a recent article, Valerie Watnick and Sarah Beaumont argue that EPA has failed to safeguard children’s health in enforcing the FQPA. Watnick and Beaumont propose reforms that the agency can adopt to protect children.
Under the FQPA, EPA must establish a “tolerance,” or a maximum permissible level of pesticide residue on a food, before authorizing a manufacturer to register a pesticide for food use. EPA must set the tolerance to establish “reasonable certainty” that consumers will not be harmed. EPA must also perform periodic review of past tolerance decisions and update tolerance levels to align with current research. If EPA determines that data about the child health risks of exposure to a particular pesticide are incomplete or indicate potential harm to youth, the FQPA requires the agency to apply a tenfold child safety factor, decreasing allowable pesticide residues by 90 percent. EPA, however, does not need to introduce the tenfold factor if the agency has reliable evidence that a smaller margin will keep children safe.
Despite these safeguards, Watnick and Beaumont claim that EPA rarely uses the tenfold safety factor. Through a review of over 700 tolerance decisions between 2006 and 2024, they find that EPA applied the tenfold safety factor only 15 percent of the time and often reduced the factor when it updated tolerance thresholds.
Watnick and Beaumont connect EPA’s leniency in part to strong judicial deference. They find that in most cases challenging EPA’s failure to apply the tenfold child safety factor, federal courts have upheld EPA’s technical judgments. Watnick and Beaumont argue, however, that since the U.S. Supreme Court recently eliminated Chevron deference, courts may no longer defer to EPA’s technical judgments on the application of a lower child safety factor.
Watnick and Beaumont also attribute EPA’s child safety decisions to its limited reliance on experts when setting pesticide limits. The authors emphasize that EPA has established expert bodies to integrate child-health researchers into regulatory decision-making. They claim, however, that EPA’s pesticide tracking system does not notify the expert bodies about tolerance decisions that result from registration petitions submitted by industry. As such, Watnick and Beaumont contend, EPA makes many tolerance decisions without crucial expert input.
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