EPA

Fourteen months ago, the Obama administration launched the first comprehensive review in 30 years of the roles of the USDA, the EPA and the FDA in regulating biotechnology. In a follow-up, the White House released a proposed update to the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology — the division of labor among regulators, first issued in 1986 — and a national strategy for modernizing biotechnology regulations.

A U.S. court of appeals overturned a lower court ruling and blocked the disclosure of ownership information about concentrated animal feeding operations, Agri-Pulse reported. The appeals court determined that the EPA had violated the Freedom of Information Act by releasing personal information, including phone numbers and email addresses, of CAFOs.

The U.S. appellate court in San Francisco set a deadline of March 31 for EPA to decide whether to allow continued use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, says Agri-Pulse. In its decision, the three-judge panel said there would be no more extensions of the deadline previously set for this Dec 31. The EPA had asked for six additional months.

After naming GOP funder Charles Herbster to be chair of his Agricultural and Rural Ag Committee, Trump has nominated Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller to be co-chair, says Mother Jones—and the press are waiting for the antics to begin.

Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, has asked the EPA to revoke the Hawaii Department of Agriculture’s authority to enforce federal pesticide regulations, claiming the department’s pesticide program is understaffed and effectively failing to do its job, reports Honolulu Civil Beat. “The public is at risk and the Department of Agriculture is asleep at the wheel,” Paul Achitoff, managing attorney of Earthjustice, told Civil Beat.

An EPA appeals board that oversees pesticide regulation upheld cancellation of U.S. use of the insecticide flubendiamide, made by Bayer and sold under the brand name Belt, said Agri-Pulse.

The federal appellate court in Atlanta says it will decide an 11-state lawsuit against the EPA's Waters of the United States rule, although the U.S. appeals court in Cincinnati is consolidating WOTUS challenges into a single case for its consideration, said DTN. A lawyer active in clean-water cases said appeals courts sometimes handle the same issue concurrently: "That is, after all, how circuit splits develop."

EPA chief Gina McCarthy told lawmakers that the agency played no major role in the decision by the WHO's cancer agency to list glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, as probably carcinogenic to humans, said DTN. The House Science Committee has questioned the classification by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and whether the IARC is skewing EPA's current review of the herbicide.

The Environmental Protection Agency would have to review all chemicals before they hit the market, taking into account their environmental and health effects, under a long-sought revision of the Toxic Substances Control Act approved by the Senate last week.

The Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to approve today legislation that would bar the EPA from implementing its Waters of the United States rule during the fiscal year that opens on Oct 1. Known as WOTUS, the rule defines the upstream reach of clean water laws and is under challenge in a federal appeals court.

In a step that pleased no one, the EPA proposed a small increase in the biofuels share of the gasoline market for 2017. The overall target for biofuels would rise to 18.8 billion gallons, up by 700 million gallons from this year, with corn ethanol earmarked for 14.8 billion gallons, a 300 million-gallon increase.

The world's largest seed company, Monsanto, is counting the EPA as the third major regulator to determine that glyphosate, the weedkiller used in combination with its GMO hybrids, is safe for humans. The herbicide has been under scrutiny since the WHO's cancer agency classified it in March 2015 as probably carcinogenic to humans.

A lawsuit filed over the weekend on behalf of consumers in California and New York accuses PepsiCo of wrongfully labeling its Quaker Oats brand “100% natural” after small amounts of the pesticide glyphosate (commonly sold as RoundUp) were detected in some oatmeal, reports The New York Times.

Colombia will once again use glyphosate to kill coca plants, after banning the practice for the last year due to carcinogenic concerns, reports The Tampa Bay Tribune.

Nearly all of the 1,782 animals and plants listed under the Endangered Species Act are at risk from the two most commonly used pesticides, according to a new EPA report.

The EPA should "proceed with utmost caution and continuously re-evaluate the underlying assumptions of your approach" in its ongoing review of neonicotinoid insecticides, said chairman Jim Imhofe of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The state Senate has passed and sent to the House a bill, SB 198, that would make Maryland "the first state in the United States to place a partial ban on the sale of certain pesticides, which have been blamed for deaths of bees around the world," says public broadcaster WAMU-FM.

A new regulation will restore so-called application exclusion zones intended to protect farmworkers and other people from exposure to pesticides as they are being applied, said the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday. The exclusion zones were created as part of a 2015 agricultural worker protection standard and were reduced in size in 2020 during the Trump era.