The EPA introduced plans late final month to reapprove three formulations of dicamba to be used on soy and cotton that’s been genetically modified to withstand the harmful herbicide. The chemical was beforehand banned by two completely different federal courts in 2020 and 2024 attributable to its devastating propensity for drifting onto non-resistant crops — so what’s modified?
What Is Dicamba?
Dicamba is a selective herbicide that targets broadleaf weeds amongst agricultural crops. By mimicking plant hormones, it triggers uncontrolled progress in inclined weeds and ultimately causes them to die out. This makes it an efficient herbicide, however it might additionally harm timber, crops, and different non-target vegetation in its neighborhood.
Within the almost 60 years because it was first launched onto the market, dicamba has confirmed to be way more unstable than different herbicides like glyphosate (and for those who don’t know what that’s, take a look at our protection on Monsanto’s Roundup right here, right here, and right here).
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Dicamba drift has broken hundreds of thousands of acres of crops throughout the Midwest and South of america1. Based on a press launch from the Middle for Meals Security and the Middle for Organic Variety, harm brought on by dicamba drift is “the worst of any herbicide within the historical past of U.S. agriculture.2” The U.S. Division of Agriculture estimates that as much as 15 million acres of soybeans have been broken by dicamba drift in 2018 alone3.
The New EPA Dicamba Proposal
After already having banned the herbicide (not as soon as, however twice!), the EPA is now making efforts to get dicamba again in use.
“Trump’s EPA is hitting new heights of absurdity by planning to greenlight a pesticide that’s precipitated probably the most intensive drift harm in U.S. agricultural historical past and twice been thrown out by federal courts,” says Nathan Donley, environmental well being science director on the Middle for Organic Variety.
Even worse, the EPA’s new proposal would make the usage of dicamba much less regulated than earlier than. The proposed determination would get rid of the appliance cutoff of June twelfth — a date steered by dicamba corporations themselves when making use of for reapprovals in 2024.
The proposal would additionally drop time-of-day restrictions, which have been proposed to scale back dicamba’s notorious volatility. These measures would get replaced with proposed temperature cutoffs of 95 levels and restricted drift buffers. The issue? Each of those restrictions have been tried up to now, and each failed to forestall drift.
This announcement was made lower than a month after Kyle Kunkler, a former lobbyist for the American Soybean Affiliation, started work as deputy assistant administrator for pesticides in EPA’s Workplace of Chemical Security and Air pollution Prevention. The ASA has been a vocal proponent of dicamba, regardless of harm to non-GMO soybean fields. The 30-day public remark interval for the EPA’s new plan expires on August twenty second.
The Well being Dangers of Dicamba
So as to add to the irony, the EPA proposal comes after a current report by the Make America Well being Once more Fee linked pesticide use to elevated danger of most cancers and different ailments. A 2020 research within the Worldwide Journal of Epidemiology confirmed that dicamba use was related to elevated danger of liver and intrahepatic bile duct cancers3. Whereas the EPA acknowledges the dangers to vegetation, it doesn’t acknowledge the human well being dangers of dicamba.
Dicamba was first launched onto {the marketplace} in 1967, and by 1969, a research in Weed Science had already indicated the chance that “vapor drift into close by soybean fields may severely harm soybeans.4”
In 2016, following the rise of glyphosate-resistant strains of soybeans and cotton, Monsanto, now Bayer, launched seeds designed to face up to “over-the-top” (OTT) use of dicamba. Inside a 12 months, state agriculture departments reported 2,708 official crop harm investigations, and threats to pollinators like monarch butterflies and rusty-patched bumblebees have been quickly recognized.
Quickly thereafter, ammonia compounds known as amines have been added to dicamba formulations in an effort to scale back volatility, however a 2022 research in Environmental Science & Expertise discovered that the amines oxidized within the air, forming carcinogenic nitrosamines and nitroamines5.
A 2021 investigation discovered that dicamba’s authentic approval excluded vital scientific proof of the herbicide’s propensity for drift, and a 2020 federal court docket determination vacating the EPA’s dicamba registration famous that the company had failed to look at the methods wherein “dicamba use would tear the social cloth of farming communities.”
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Sources:
- https://investigatemidwest.org/2020/12/04/buy-it-or-else-inside-monsanto-and-basfs-moves-to-force-dicamba-on-farmers/
- https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/information/press-releases/trump-epa-announces-plan-to-reapprove-dangerous-drift-prone-pesticide-dicamba-2025-07-23/
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7660157/
- https://www.jstor.org/steady/4041262
- https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c03740
