Advancing alternatives to pesticides worldwide • www.panna.org Year-end 2011 Pesticide Action Network NEWS Inside This Issue Honey Bee Die-off p. 2 Tomatoland p. 3 2010-2011 Annual Report p. 4 We Don’t Give Up Safe Strawberry campaign gains momentum in the face of a corporate juggernaut Your engagement has kept methyl iodide use in California to a handful of applications — on less than 20 acres — despite the pesticide industry’s continuing full-court press. And we’re not nearly done. On October 12, the same day that PAN’s coalition filed our opening brief in a lawsuit to stop the use of cancer-causing methyl iodide, Santa Barbara County officials approved the first application of the chemical along the California coast and the first in strawberry fields. This story is far from usual. The regulatory system normally takes decades to ban a pesticide, long after the science proves it was causing health damages. Here, one year after the Schwarzenegger administration invoked emergency powers to speed methyl iodide into use, only one strawberry grower has applied it. You and many, many others have upped the ante. Last year 53,000 people petitioned California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) not to register it. In May the country’s top scientists (including three Nobel lau- reates) and 200,000-plus ordinary people urged EPA Adminis- trator Lisa Jackson to reject corporate power and stick with the science. EPA tells us they’re thinking about it. Memos reveal corporate influence Last December, Earthjustice filed suit against both the state and Arysta, methyl iodide’s maker, on behalf of PAN, United Farm Workers of America and other plaintiffs. In August, we forced DPR to release internal memos they claimed would compromise “the deliberative process.” One from February 2010 (withheld until specifically requested by EJ attorney Greg Loarie), “details discussions in which DPR and Arysta essen- tially agreed upon new regulatory target levels.” No wonder DPR management’s final decision in December had no rational scientific basis. The agency had decided to allow exposure by workers and residents to 120 times more methyl iodide than, according to other memos we uncovered, its own staff scientists determined might be safe. DPR’s Scientific Advisory Committee agreed: “We expect that any anticipated scenario for the agricultural or struc- tural fumigation use of this agent would result in exposures to a large number of the public and thus would have a significant adverse impact on the public health.” Working with farmers for solutions We’re not only filing lawsuits, mobilizing petitions and staging public demonstrations. We’ve publicized data about fumigant drift collected with PAN’s Drift Catchers. Our coalition has taken legislators to tour farms successfully growing strawber- ries without reliance on any fumigants like methyl iodide. And we’ve made a concrete proposal to Governor Jerry Brown for a panel that creates a plan to support farmers in their transition off all fumigants. A month ago a reporter told us that Arysta had stopped using the term methyl iodide, referring only to their brand name “Midas” or the lesser-known name iodomethane, because “the public knows methyl iodide means poison.” We’re persistent. And we’re impatient when lives are at stake. Arysta and the state are expected to respond to our legal brief mid-November. The case will be heard in early January 2012. In the meantime, we’re committed to pushing on all fronts for safe and cancer-free strawberries. Your efforts are making all the difference. We will meet you at the finish line. World Food Day October 16, PAN put out a call for your stories. How have the Big 6 GMO/pesticide corporations impacted your life? Monsanto & co. keep the global food system on a toxic treadmill. Tell them we want off this ride! Upload your message at pesticideaction.tumblr.com and we will deliver it. T he public knows methyl iodide means poison.
Transcript
Advancing alternatives to pesticides worldwide • www.panna.org Year-end 2011
Pesticide Action Network NEWS
Inside This IssueHoney Bee Die-off p. 2 Tomatoland p. 32010-2011 Annual Report p. 4
We Don’t Give Up Safe Strawberry campaign gains momentum in the face of a corporate juggernaut
Your engagement has kept methyl iodide use in California to a handful of applications—on less than 20 acres— despite the pesticide industry’s continuing full-court press. And we’re not nearly done.
On October 12, the same day that PAN’s coalition filed our opening brief in a lawsuit to stop the use of cancer-causing methyl iodide, Santa Barbara County officials approved the first application of the chemical along the California coast and the first in strawberry fields.
This story is far from usual. The regulatory system normally takes decades to ban a pesticide, long after the science proves it was causing health damages. Here, one year after the Schwarzenegger administration invoked emergency powers to speed methyl iodide into use, only one strawberry grower has applied it.
You and many, many others have upped the ante. Last year 53,000 people petitioned California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) not to register it. In May the country’s top scientists (including three Nobel lau-reates) and 200,000-plus ordinary people urged EPA Adminis-trator Lisa Jackson to reject corporate power and stick with the science. EPA tells us they’re thinking about it.
Memos reveal corporate influenceLast December, Earthjustice filed suit against both the state and Arysta, methyl iodide’s maker, on behalf of PAN, United Farm Workers of America and other plaintiffs. In August, we forced DPR to release internal memos they claimed would compromise “the deliberative process.” One from February 2010 (withheld until specifically requested by EJ attorney Greg Loarie), “details discussions in which DPR and Arysta essen-tially agreed upon new regulatory target levels.” No wonder DPR management’s final decision in December had no rational scientific basis. The agency had decided to allow exposure by workers and residents to 120 times more methyl iodide than, according to other memos we uncovered, its own staff scientists determined might be safe.
DPR’s Scientific Advisory Committee agreed: “We expect that any anticipated scenario for the agricultural or struc-tural fumigation use of this agent would result in exposures to a large number of the public and thus would have a significant adverse impact on the public health.”
Working with farmers for solutions We’re not only filing lawsuits, mobilizing petitions and staging public demonstrations. We’ve publicized data about fumigant drift collected with PAN’s Drift Catchers. Our coalition has taken legislators to tour farms successfully growing strawber-ries without reliance on any fumigants like methyl iodide. And we’ve made a concrete proposal to Governor Jerry Brown for a panel that creates a plan to support farmers in their transition off all fumigants.
A month ago a reporter told us that Arysta had stopped using the term methyl iodide, referring only to their brand name “Midas” or the lesser-known name iodomethane, because “the public knows methyl iodide means poison.”
We’re persistent. And we’re impatient when lives are at stake. Arysta and the state are expected to respond to our legal brief mid-November. The case will be heard in early January 2012. In the meantime, we’re committed to pushing on all fronts for safe and cancer-free strawberries. Your efforts are making all the difference.
We will meet you at the finish line.
World Food Day October 16, PAN put out a call for your stories. How have the Big 6 GMO/pesticide corporations impacted your life? Monsanto & co. keep the global food system on a toxic treadmill. Tell them we want off this ride!
Upload your message at pesticideaction.tumblr.com and we will deliver it.
The public knows
methyl iodide means poison.
2 Pesticide Action Network News Year-end 2011
Honey Bee Die-offThe public debate over what lies behind colony collapse disorder (CCD) is so polarized and confusing that some concerned citizens find it difficult to know how or where to intervene. In fact, the debate has become a case study in public, scientific controversy. As with the link between tobacco and cancer, and with climate change, this issue has become characterized by policymaker inaction in the face of irreducibly com-plex science.
Two increasingly intractable sides have emerged: beekeepers and environmen-talists vs. pesticide companies and the scientists supported by them. While PAN’s position in this line-up is clear enough, our commitment to scientific rigor and informed, non-partisan pub-lic conversation runs deep. We believe that engaged and rigorous scientific citizenship is a vital part of democratic civic life and a needed force in environ-mental decision-making. This is even more important in cases such as this where the debate has become position-driven and the conversation between experts has clearly broken down.
Historically, these kinds of logjams are broken through either concerted public demand, a catastrophic focusing or “triggering” event that compels policy-maker action—or both. With one-third of our bees dying off each winter, and wild pollinators facing similarly catastrophic declines, we have before us the focusing event. What’s needed now is public demand for policy action.
PAN’s new state-of-the-science report PAN’s role in this debate is to inform public debate and build national will for policy action on a timeline that will be meaningful to bees and beekeep-ers. Our analysis of the causes of bee decline is detailed in our new report at www.panna.org/bees. We focus on pesticides as one of three leading causal factors in part because we find pesticides a promising point of inter-vention—we can do something about them. Evidence shows that pesticides are key both directly and in combina-tion with the other two factors most frequently identified: pathogens and
Taggart Siegel filming beekeeper Gunther Hauk by his hives at Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary in Virginia for Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us? This beautiful film tells the story of colony collapse disorder from the point of view of beekeepers and others fighting to save honey bees.
poor nutrition. A few facts from our report:
• Bees have recently begun “entomb-ing,” or sealing off, pesticide-laced pollen stores. According to leading bee researcher Dr. Jeff Pettis, “The pres-ence of entombing is the biggest single predictor of colony loss. It’s a defense mechanism that has failed.”
• Bees are exposed to a dizzying array of pesticides, especially in the U.S. where some 12,000 active ingredients are on the market (vs. 500 in France and 300 in the UK).
• Bees are extraordinarily susceptible to pesticides: when the honey bee genome was mapped in 2006 they found that bees have significantly fewer detoxifica-tion genes than other insects.
• Recent science shows that extremely low-dose exposures to neonicotinoids undermine immunity—render-ing honey bees more susceptible to pathogens.
• Beekeepers report higher loss rates after having their hives near corn. Widely used fungicides synergize with common bee-toxic pesticide classes (neonicotinoids and pyrethroids), as much as 1,141-fold. Since 2007, fun-gicide spraying on corn has increased dramatically, while most corn seed in the U.S. is treated with neonicotinoids.
We know enough to act As is the case with nearly all environ-mental health issues, there are too many factors in play out in the real world to isolate a single “cause.” Many causes operate in concert, with differing levels of relative potency according to the timing, combination and situation—this is the level of complexity in most instances. The state of the science as we find it indicates that this kind of com-plexity is also true in the case of CCD.
But we do know some things, and, more to the point, we know enough to act. Italy, Germany and France have taken action on neonicotinoid pesti-cides, and beekeepers report signs of colony recovery. With your help, we’re calling on the U.S. to do the same.
The science is complex. It usually is.
Honey bees have gradually declined in the U.S. since 1947 at a rate averaging 1% per year. Declines have
been steeper since 1987, but the last four winters have seen losses of 29–36% per year. Europeans have seen a similar pattern, with steep losses since the 1990s. They’ve taken action.
Pesticide Action Network News Year-end 2011 3
My interest in tomatoes started with taste—or lack thereof. But I soon realized that the out-of-season tomato was a poster child for much of what is wrong with modern industrial agricul-ture. If you strip away—or in some cases deliberately contravene—all things sustainable, organic, seasonal, local, fair trade, you end up with a winter tomato, along with a litany of horrors that range from abject slavery to workers being regularly sprayed with pesticides, including many that PAN rates as Bad Actors—carcinogens, neu-rotoxins, mutagens, and ones that can be fatal upon contact.
Because we eat so many of them, toma-toes are an important source of nutri-tion in the American diet. Yet a modern tomato has 62% less calcium, 30% less vitamin C, and 19% less niacin by weight than its 1960s counterpart. Essentially they’ve taken the tomato’s nutrient package and added water. The output of an industrial tomato plant simply exceeds its ability to manufac-ture nutrients.
Florida’s tomato industry has nothing to do with botany and horticulture. If those were the criteria, Florida would be one of the worst places imaginable to grow tomatoes. The industry has everything to do with money: Florida happens to be warm enough to get a crop of tomatoes at a time of year when much of the country is too cold. A field gets hit with pesticides up to twice-weekly. Arysta LifeScience, the company that makes methyl iodide,
worked hand-in-hand with the Florida Department of Agricul-ture on studies that led to methyl iodide’s approval for tomatoes and other crops. Florida and Califor-nia produce the same amount of fresh-market tomatoes on the same acreage. Because of adverse grow-ing conditions, Florida farmers apply eight times the pesticides as California farmers.
What to do? The best place to start is at home by buying (or, better yet, growing) organic food. I’m fortunate to live on 30 acres in Vermont where I raise a big garden and tend a flock of egg-laying hens. The garden keeps me awash in vegetables and fruits for six months a year, and I have never sprayed it with a chemical pesticide or fertilized with anything other than cover crops and contributions from the hens when I muck out their house.
Then I think we all have to do our bit to support getting the truth out about industrial food production. PAN and other groups have made tremendous progress, but there is a lot of work to be done, and the agrichemical companies have huge budgets to spend on misinformation campaigns and lobbying politicians. I used PAN’s pesticideinfo.org to identify the effects of more than 100 chemicals that Florida tomato growers apply to their fields. If this information had not been compiled and made available to
me (or anyone else) online, there is no way I could have found out the truth.
Barry Estabrook is an investigative reporter, columnist and author of the bestseller Tomatoland—available as a thank you gift for PAN donors. Estabrook has covered how our food is produced for Gourmet, The Atlantic and the New York Times, and blogs at politicsoftheplate.com. More at www.panna.org/blog/pan-conversation-barry-estabrook
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring FruitFrom PAN’s conversation with Barry Estabrook
Support a healthy environment & sustainable agriculture with a year-end donation
We’re sweetening the pot this season with three new gifts to thank you for your support of safe and fair food: Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook, the DVD Queen of the Sun (not yet in stores), and Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living by Rachel Kaplan with K. Rudy Blume. Urban Homesteading is packed with concise how-to information that you can immediately put into practice, from making solar cookers to planting for pollinators to raising chickens on a tiny plot.
Learn more at www.panna.org/Gift or call 415-981-1771 x 309.
Seven major farmworker slavery cases have been won in Florida, freeing 1,200 people. This year the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange finally agreed to operate under the Fair Food Agreement, a victory after nearly two decades of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Photo: Scott Robertson/CIW
Pesticide Action Network North America Our mission: PAN North America works to replace the use of hazardous pesticides with ecologically sound and socially just alternatives. As one of five PAN Regional Centers worldwide, we link local and international consumer, labor, health, environment and agriculture groups into an international citizens’ action network. This network challenges the global proliferation of pesticides, defends basic rights to health and environmental quality, and works to ensure the transition to a just and viable society.Printed with soy-based ink on New Leaf Reincarnation: 100% Recycled, 50% PCW, Processed Chlorine Free.
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How Your Support Was Used
Administration& Fundraising
Programs & Coalitions
Financial Report PAN recognizes all grants, pledges and contributions in the year they are committed. Our overhead expense (administration and fundraising) was 12.7% of total unrestricted revenue (12.8% of expenses) in our fiscal year ending June 30, 2011.
For more information, please see our audited financial statements and our IRS Form 990, available at www.panna.org. IRS Form 990 is also available on GuideStar.org.
Statement of Financial PositionJune 30, 2011
AssetsCash 642,547Accounts receivable 247,617Grants receivable, net 271,000Inventory 11,399Prepaids and other receivables 38,391Undepreciated furniture & equipment 28,567Deposits 6,957Total Assets 1,246,478
Liabilities & Net Assets
LiabilitiesAccounts payable 20,240Accrued liabilities 57,396Custodial fund accounts 105,467Total Liabilities 183,103
Net AssetsUnrestricted 219,011Temporarily restricted 844,364Total Net Assets 1,063,375
Total Liabilities and Net Assets 1,246,478
2010–2011 Annual Report
Statement of Activities for the year ended June 30, 2011
Temporarily Unrestricted Restricted TotalRevenue and SupportGrants 125,000 761,000 886,000Contributions 495,210 390,640 885,850Contracts - 91,332 91,332Program service fees 1,765 24,031 25,796Investment income 695 - 695Other 1,377 14,354 15,731Contributed goods & services 11,208 133,391 144,599Net assets released from restrictions 1,770,288 (1,770,288) -Total Revenue and Support 2,405,543 (355,540) 2,050,003
Change in Net Assets 25,173 (355,540) (330,367)Net Assets, Beginning of Year 193,838 1,199,904 1,393,742Net Assets, End of Year 219,011 844,364 1,063,375
Board of Directors as of June 30, 2011Judy HatcherPresidentEnvironmental Support Center
Polly HoppinVice PresidentLowell Center
Lucia SayreSecretary Physicians for Social Responsibility
Program ImpactsPAN made substantial progress toward our strategic objectives in 2010–2011, despite radical anti-regulation attacks by Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta and lack of leadership in Washington. We expanded our base at the state level, especially in the Midwest, where farm policy is driven, and online everywhere. (PAN activists now number more than 85,000.) A detailed report is available online at www.panna.org/annual-report.
Jennifer SokoloveTreasurerCompton Foundation
Susan BakerTrillium Asset Management
Martha GuzmanCalifornia Rural Legal Assistance Foundation
Ana Duncan PardoToxic Free North Carolina
Ted SchettlerScience and Environmental Health Network
Chloe SchwabeNational Council of Churches
Guy WilliamsG.O. Williams & Associates
Highlights of the year include:Endosulfan was put on the ban list, capping PAN’s decade-long global campaign to eliminate this DDT-era pesticide. The April victory was cheered from India to Africa, California to Florida, where children will no longer be exposed.
A million people spoke up for bees by calling on EPA to pull clothianidin off the market after PAN joined beekeepers and partners around the country and the world in calling attention to a flawed scientific study submitted by Bayer.
Your calls to investigate Monsanto were delivered in PAN’s testimony at the final Department of Justice workshop on corporate concentration in agriculture in December 2010.
We held back use of methyl iodide on California strawberries. Our coalition’s demonstrations, petitions, and lobbying kept Arysta on defense in the media and the fumigant out of the fields.
