Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Unfortunately, if the department approves the new rule, it will have almost no control over the amounts of methyl bromide actually used, since most fumigating would occur abroad, before shipment. The U.S.-imposed regulation could also force developing countries to use far more methyl bromide than they now need, hampering their efforts to cut future use of the chemical as required under the Montreal Protocol.
Typically, treaty exemptions must be approved by the U.N. Ozone Secretariat, the Montreal Protocol's governing body, but a loophole allows the Agriculture Department to put its rule into practice without such approval. That's because quarantine and pre-shipment applications for invasive-pest control accounted for a minuscule amount of methyl bromide use in the past and weren't banned.
"What you have is a situation where the quarantine use was a small but important one, the tail on the dog," explains Doniger, of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "What the Montreal Protocol parties decided to do was phase out the dog -- the many agricultural uses for methyl bromide -- and live with the tail. Now the Bush administration wants to reverse the situation. Under the Department of Agriculture proposal, the tail will become three times larger than the dog."
The Agriculture Department admits in its environmental assessment that its strategy, while putting the ozone layer at risk, may not even be effective. Some bugs will survive methyl bromide fumigation, and even a few will be harmful since they can multiply, eventually ruining crops and ecosystems. The department even admits to better alternatives. One surefire approach would be to ban all raw-wood packing, a viable global goal if done over a reasonable transition period.
The Agriculture Department isn't the only agency spurring methyl bromide production. The Environmental Protection Agency is seeking methyl bromide "critical use" exemptions at the U.N. Ozone Secretariat meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, in November.
The EPA, reportedly under pressure from the White House and Agriculture Department, wants exemptions to raise methyl bromide use by 39 percent above 1991 baseline levels for 16 crops, including strawberries, tomatoes, ginger, sweet potatoes and turf grass. The agency says there is no technically or economically viable alternative for these crops. If granted, these exemptions alone would stop and reverse the pesticide's total phaseout in 2005.
While EPA claims its exemption request doesn't violate the letter of the law as stated in the treaty, Doniger, a Clinton administration diplomat, disagrees. "What we negotiated in 1997 was a total global phaseout of methyl bromide in four steps, [reaching] a total phaseout in 2005," he told Salon. "An exemption was included, in that last step, that allowed continued production for 'critical uses,' in order to help the manufacturers and users achieve a soft landing before total phaseout."
But the Bush exemptions, if approved, would roll back a 70 percent methyl bromide reduction already in place, to a 61 percent reduction. Instead of a total ban, it would permit the manufacture of 10,000 metric tons of the pesticide, not counting the Agriculture Department's quarantine and pre-shipment request.
"If the Bush administration interpretation of the treaty were followed, the parties could agree to any amount of exemptions," says Doniger. They could raise production all the way back "to 100 percent of each country's 1991 baseline," he adds. "This is an absurd reading of the protocol." The U.S. also wants an added exemption in 2006, a contingency not ever addressed by the treaty.
The EPA says that its exemptions "reflect a downward trend," but anyone doing the math can see that the U.S. is asking for a 9 percent increase over current production. When asked whether Salon's math was correct, Drusilla Hufford, director of the global programs division at EPA, skirted the question repeatedly.
"We are absolutely not in violation of the Montreal Protocol," Hufford asserts. "I think that looking at it as a setback is a mistake. It isn't an appropriate question to ask ... We have conducted very successful phaseouts of a number of chemicals that included this kind of policy approach." True, the phaseout of other ozone depleters allowed exemptions, but not of such massive proportions. For example, a tiny exemption for chlorofluorocarbons was allowed for personal asthma inhalers.
When asked when a total ban of methyl bromide might happen, Hufford said: "I really couldn't predict that."
Doniger worries that the Bush administration request, if approved by the United Nations, may weaken the will of other nations. "If the United States backs out of its methyl bromide phaseout, you could see the developing countries balking not only about phasing out methyl bromide, but other chemicals as well. Why should they go to strenuous efforts to get rid of [them] ... when America isn't meeting its commitments? We could see the whole treaty unravel."
Josh Karliner, a board member with Corporate Watch, an anti-globalization activist group, expresses another worry about a failed ban. "This is also a Homeland Security issue. A few weeks after 9/11," he says, "I got a call from the Coast Guard wanting to track down information on methyl bromide production and distribution because it is a highly toxic, colorless, odorless gas. This is not the kind of chemical you want to be freely proliferating at this dangerous time in history."
EPA claims that there are no viable alternative to the pesticide. But as long ago as 1995, a U.N. scientific panel concluded that alternatives to methyl bromide were either available or at an advanced stage of development for more than 90 percent of methyl bromide uses. That puts the lie to an EPA claim that there has been insufficient time to approve substitutes.
That's also a far cry from a methyl bromide industry claim that farmers worldwide have absolutely no "effective alternatives" to the poison, reports Corporate Watch. It is to those industries -- the methyl bromide makers, users and lobbying groups -- to whom one must look to understand the Bush administration's attempt to backpedal on its treaty commitments.
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