The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to reapprove dicamba despite the pesticide’s documented health and environmental risks, The Washington Post reports.
In a draft statement viewed by the news outlet, the EPA characterizes the new use guidelines as "the most protective dicamba registration in agency history" and notes the inclusion of "several measures" to head off "ecological risks."
"For many growers, this is a vital tool that they will see as necessary to their crop production success," the statement says.
Dicamba is a widely used herbicide sprayed mainly on soybeans and cotton to kill tough broadleaf weeds, but it’s been controversial because it can drift off-target, sometimes miles, damaging neighboring crops, gardens, trees, and wild plants.
Farmers turned to it as weeds became resistant to older chemicals like glyphosate, yet dicamba’s tendency to volatilize and move through the air has triggered widespread crop injury complaints, lawsuits, and ongoing debate about its environmental and human health risks, especially for people living or working near sprayed fields.
Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, whose organization has sued the EPA three times over dicamba, told the Post there is virtually no way to stop dicamba drift.
"The fact that we’re here again after two failed attempts to fix this broken pesticide shows that Lee Zeldin and his army of industry lobbyists are utterly incapable of protecting the public," he said, referring to the agency’s administrator.
Dicamba has sparked years of lawsuits from farmers for damage they argue was predictable and preventable.
One of the biggest cases came from Missouri’s Bader Farms, which won a major jury verdict against Monsanto (now Bayer) and BASF after dicamba allegedly devastated its peach operation; the litigation later expanded into a wave of similar claims nationwide.
Bayer has since agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle dicamba crop-damage lawsuits, while environmental groups have also sued the EPA over its approvals, arguing the agency underestimated the chemical’s drift risks and failed to follow federal pesticide law.