Caveat eater: Strawberries are about to get more toxic

[Kadie]

Caveat eater: Strawberries are about to get more toxic

Ever wondered exactly how powerful the biggest corporate lobbies are? In Washington, note that Republicans support suspected terrorists' "right" to purchase guns, even while maintaining that no other part of the U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions apply to them. And in Sacramento, a pesticide so cancer-causing that it's often used specifically to create cancer in rats for medical experiments was just approved for use on the state's strawberry crop.




The state's own Department of Pesticide Regulation had advised in a report against approving the gas, methyl iodide. And 50 Nobel prize winners asked the U.S. EPA not to approve it. (It did.) According to farmers, there are a number of alternatives to the stuff, including solarization, anaerobic soil disinfestation and natural pesticides. And it's especially important to use safe materials only in strawberries, which hold the chemicals they're treated with. (More background in this TGL post.)

Lobbying for methyl iodide, we have a single company, the largest pesticide manufacturer in the world, Arysta LifeScience. The Strawberry Growers Commission — the people who employ the people who'd be breathing the stuff in — had weakly declined to take a position.

The state is accepting public comment through June 14. Let them know that people trump profits.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?entry_id=62991&tsp=1#ixzz0nFn1DGU0