Almost 25 years after federal regulators curbed household use of a pesticide linked to learning disorders in children, and three years after a total ban on its use on food crops, the chemical is again being applied to everything from bananas to turnips in most states.
The saga of this pesticide, which has the unwieldy name chlorpyrifos, is a stark reminder of why so many Americans are alarmed about industrial farming and the food supply. The concern helped propel Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential candidacy and subsequent selection to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
The issue is also a vivid illustration of the obstacles that regulators will face if they try to make good on campaign promises to remove harmful chemicals from the food supply, as Mr. Kennedy often has.
The latest twist arrived on Monday, when the Environmental Protection Agency proposed outlawing the use of chlorpyrifos on farmed foods — except on 11 crops, including fruits children tend to eat in large quantities, such as apples, oranges, peaches and cherries.
In an interview, Dr. Michal Freedhoff, assistant administrator of the office of chemical safety and pollution prevention at the E.P.A., said the proposed rule would provide the greatest benefit to children’s health while still abiding by a federal-court decision last year that overturned the agency’s original ban.
The proposal will lower the amount of the pesticide applied to fields and orchards annually by 3.9 million pounds, from the 5.3 million pounds used each year from 2014 to 2018, according to a preliminary E.P.A. analysis.
“This will result in a 70 percent reduction from the historic total amounts of chlorpyrifos used on food before this all started,” Dr. Freedhoff said.
The new permitted crops will include alfalfa, asparagus, soybeans, strawberries, wheat, sugar beets and cotton. The pesticide would also be allowed on Christmas tree farms and golf courses, and on tobacco and crops grown for seed, as well as for public mosquito control and in enclosed ant and roach bait.
The public has 60 days to comment on the rule.
Chlorpyrifos manufacturers have indicated they will not challenge the proposed limits and will not pursue broader food crop use, Dr. Freedhoff said. Gharda Chemicals, the manufacturer based in Mumbai, India, that sued over the original ban, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Mr. Kennedy also did not respond to requests for comment.
While the Food and Drug Administration, which is part of the health and human services department, monitors the U.S. food supply to ensure that pesticide residues on foods don’t exceed allowable limits, the E.P.A. sets those parameters and determines which pesticides can be applied to foods marketed in the United States.
The E.P.A. relies on scientific assessments to judge the health risks of chemicals like chlorpyrifos. But even when the agency favors yanking a pesticide from the market, the regulatory process for doing so is cumbersome and difficult, Dr. Freedhoff said.
It can take five years or more, if the manufacturers don’t voluntarily recall their products.
“You have to go through a scientific advisory panel review, get input from the secretary of agriculture, and there are multiple administrative appeals available to companies,” she said.
“The involuntary cancellation process is rarely used because it’s so lengthy and onerous.”
(In August, however, the agency issued an emergency order to suspend the use of a pesticide called dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate — DCPA, or Dacthal — because of the potential risk of birth defects.)
The E.P.A. is buffeted by political winds and commercial interests. Many of its scientific assessments are challenged in court, both by safety advocates who want more restrictive policies and manufacturers who want fewer.
Most recently a court told the agency to revisit a safety review of the controversial herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, after finding the E.P.A. had not adequately accounted for cancer risks.
In 2017, during the first Trump administration, the E.P.A. rejected the advice of its own scientists to ban chlorpyrifos, and pushed its staff to draft a ruling denying a decade-old petition by environmentalists to ban the pesticide.
Emails obtained by The New York Times showed that E.P.A. officials had closely coordinated their decision with both the White House and the Department of Agriculture, which had questioned the justification for the ban.
Environmental groups sued, and in 2021 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the E.P.A. had wrongfully denied the petition and gave the agency a deadline for implementing a ban on chlorpyrifos.
Corteva Agriscience, a spinoff of DowDuPont, which was the largest U.S. manufacturer at one point, stopped selling the pesticide in 2020 and voluntarily canceled its registration with the E.P.A., according to a company spokesman. (Registration is required for all pesticides distributed in the United States.)
The European Union banned chlorpyrifos as well, a move upheld by the European Court of Justice after legal challenges. Five U.S. states — New York, Maryland, California, Hawaii and Oregon — individually banned use of the pesticide, though they cannot prevent food with chlorpyrifos residue from being sold in their states.
But Gharda Chemicals and some 20 associations representing sugar beet, soybean, and fruit and vegetable growers sued the E.P.A. over the ban in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
That court reversed the ban, pointing to the E.P.A.’s own analyses stating that 11 “high- benefit” agricultural uses could safely be retained. The agency’s proposed rule announced Monday is intended to satisfy that court decision.
Chlorpyrifos is an insecticide valued by farmers because it is inexpensive and kills a wide range of insects and pests. But high levels of exposure to this class of pesticides, called organophosphates, can lead to neurological effects such as tremors, fatigue and nausea.
The chemical works against insects by preventing the breakdown of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that enables chemical communication to take place between a nerve cell and its target, like a muscle fiber or gland.
The subsequent accumulation of acetylcholine can cause a range of adverse effects, from muscle twitches to learning and memory impairments, according to an E.P.A. report.
Pesticides like chlorpyrifos “kill pests by basically attacking the nervous system,” said Erin Hodgson, an entomologist who teaches farmers at Iowa State University. “And their nervous system isn’t much different, surprisingly, from that of mammals.”
“So you can imagine, little doses over time, especially for infants and small people, could have some impacts on their nervous system as well.”
The E.P.A. has linked prenatal and early childhood exposure to chlorpyrifos with neurodevelopmental effects and impaired nervous system development.
The agency relied heavily on a study of 265 children by the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, which found a link between chlorpyrifos exposure and neurodevelopmental problems at age 3.
Scientists reported an inverse relationship between the amount of the pesticide in umbilical cord blood samples and the children’s I.Q. scores and working memory at age 7.
Though the findings from human studies are observational, animal studies that found impaired communication in rat pups exposed prenatally to chlorpyrifos gave supporting evidence.
Lawyers for Earthjustice, a public interest environmental law organization, said the restrictions proposed on Monday were inadequate to protect children, and do not safeguard farm workers or drinking water.
“The core question is, is the E.P.A. going to protect children from learning disabilities and behavioral disorders?” said Patti Goldman, a lawyer with the group. “They have evidence in front of them that children exposed to chlorpyrifos are having these disorders at very, very small amounts of exposure.”
“What we really need is reinstatement of the full ban,” she added.
Mr. Kennedy has pledged to clean up the food supply he claims is “poisoning” America’s children and contributing to obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases.
He has said he wants to rid processed food of dyes and other chemicals and additives, and has accused the E.P.A. of laxly regulating chemicals like glyphosate.
He has called the agency a “partner in crime” with corporations that endanger Americans’ health. Dozens of pesticides that have been banned in Europe are still in use in the United States, he noted in a recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal.
Surveys find broad public support for a safer food supply. Retail sales of organic products hit a high in 2023, with a record $69.7 billion. Fruits and vegetables were the most popular segment of the organic market, accounting for almost one-third of sales, according to the Organic Trade Association.
In a survey of 1,200 registered voters commissioned by the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at University of California, San Francisco, and conducted by Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling firm, more than 90 percent said that it’s important to remove harmful chemicals from where people live, work and go to school, even if it increases costs for some products, and that both the government and companies have a role.
