After three Hawaiian counties lost efforts to regulate GMOs and require pesticide disclosure on the local level, Democratic state Rep. Richard Creagan is proposing a change to a state bill that would require agribusinesses to reveal what kinds of pesticides they are using, where they are using them, and in what quantities.
An earlier version of Senate Bill 804, which was already approved by the Senate, “sought to raise the amount of money that the Department of Agriculture can keep from the pesticide use revolving fund,” essentially money collected by Hawaii’s Department of Agriculture from licensing and registration of pesticide products, as well as from training fees, says Civil Beat.
Creagan’s proposal would alter the bill’s language to “require farms that use more than 10 pounds of restricted-use pesticides in any year to submit annual reports detailing their applications of all pesticides,” says Civil Beat.
An example of a “restricted-use” chemical would be the insecticide chlorpyrifos, which the EPA has previously recommended banning in agriculture due to concerns about how it affects human health.
“The draft proposal would also set aside an unspecified amount of money to the pesticide use revolving fund, and give money to the University of Hawaii’s medical school to study the exposure of pregnant women to chlorpyrifos,” says Civil Beat.
Unlike Creagan, many of Hawaii’s state legislators sided with agricultural interests over environmentalists during the the county-level fights, and earlier this year nixed another bill that would have required pesticide disclosure.