More than 16,000 farmers and agricultural stakeholders submitted comments against the EPA’s proposed revision to its 2020 atrazine registration review decision. Greg Krissek is the Co-Chair of the Triazine Network and says he wasn’t surprised by such a large number of comments.
“No, I’m not terribly surprised. I think that’s a good number for the ag community to respond. I don’t think we know yet how many opponent comments there were, and this is one of the things we work hard with. So yeah, I am the co-chair of the Triazine Network, and that’s a group of commodity and farm organizations that work on this issue and have been working on this issue going on for 25 years now, believe it or not.”
There are a couple of next steps in the process now that the comment period is over according to Krissek.
“One, EPA will be reading and analyzing the comments to get the weight of the public sentiment on it. But a really important part, in this particular time, is that EPA has publicly committed that there will be a Scientific Advisory Panel, or it’s called an SAP, held specifically on the part of this proposal, which is establishing what’s called a Level of Concern, LOC. Or, in this case, is called a C-LOC.”
He talks about the EPA proposal; “EPA proposed 3.4 parts per billion. There have been a couple of different Scientific Advisory Panels in the last 20 years. Their mission is to say, ‘what does the science say,’ so that EPA should make decisions based on sound and credible science. Since 2011, we feel that there have been several studies that have reaffirmed the safety of this product and the fact that a reasonable C-LOC could be as high as 25 or 26.”
Krissek discusses what the ideal outcome of this process would be for agriculture.
“Through this process, getting the C-LOC number right is of critical importance, and we’ll do the SAP. So, at least the 15 parts per billion is my answer, or more, depending on what the science says.”
