The decision is a victory for environmental activists who have fought to stop the use of the chemical that is applied to crops ranging from corn and soybeans to Brussels sprouts and broccoli.

“EPA is taking an overdue step to protect public health,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan. “Ending the use of chlorpyrifos on food will help to ensure children, farmworkers, and all people are protected from the potentially dangerous consequences of this pesticide.”

Chlorpyrifos has been used as a pesticide since 1965 on farms and in non-agricultural areas such as golf courses, according to the EPA.

However, applications have declined due to state restrictions, reduced production and the development of alternative products, the agency said.

The EPA banned the use of chlorpyrifos in 2015 under President Barack Obama after the agency decided it could not be certain whether exposure to the chemical in food and water would be harmful. But President Donald Trump’s EPA reversed the decision and said there was not enough evidence to link exposure to chlorpyrifos to children’s health issues.

“EPA is finally following its own findings on this poisonous pesticide,” said Allison Johnson, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Last year, California prohibited farmers from using chlorpyrifos products and manufacturers from selling them due to health concerns.

Corteva, the world’s largest manufacturer of the chemical, in 2020 said it would stop producing chlorpyrifos because of declining sales.

Cancelled in Canada

Registered in Canada since 1969, chlorpyrifos is used to control certain cutworms in corn and potatoes, midge in wheat, and grasshoppers in cereal crops and canola.

Sold in Canada at the farm level under brand names including Corteva’s Lorsban, Adama Canada’s Pyrinex, Cheminova’s Nufos and Ipco’s Citadel, the chemical’s product labels also make note of its “acute mammalian toxicity.”

Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) launched a environmental re-evaluation of chlorpyrifos in 2018, and found “risks of concern” to “beneficial arthropods, birds, mammals and all aquatic biota.”

PMRA’s re-evaluation decision in December 2020 cancelled nearly all outdoor uses of the chemical, except for use in greenhouse ornamentals; control of Japanese beetle larvae in outdoor ornamentals; elm bark beetle and mountain pine beetle control; mosquito control; and non-residential “structural” uses.

Companies holding chlorpyrifos registrations in Canada for cancelled uses can sell the product until December this year, after which retailers may sell it until December next year, and end-users may apply the product until December 2023.

Two agricultural uses were to get an extension on those deadlines: alfalfa looper control in canola and darksided and redbacked cutworm control in garlic.

Those two specific uses “were found to lack suitable alternatives,” PMRA said in its decision, and those cancellations were to be “delayed for an additional two years to allow growers to find pest management solutions.”

Health Canada also said it planned to separately update its assessment for human health concerns related to chlorpyrifos, as “new studies related to human health assessment have been generated.”

In May this year, however, PMRA said the human health assessment was “no longer needed,” after it issued a data call-in notice to registration holders for the chemical and registrants “failed to satisfy the data requirements.”

Thus, the agency said, all pest control products containing chlorpyrifos are now included in the same cancellation schedule — including for alfalfa looper control in canola and darksided and redbacked cutworm control in garlic.

The last date of use for all current chlorpyrifos products and uses in Canada is now set at Dec. 10, 2023.

— Reporting for Reuters by Tom Polansek in Chicago. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff. Updated to include PMRA’s May decision.

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“I am encouraged by that, but we want to make sure that is the case,” Chorney said July 3 in an interview.

“It’s important that it’s not forgotten. We’re not just talking about dandelions in Assiniboine Park.”

Chorney was responding to the government’s June 28 announcement that it will introduce legislation in the fall banning “synthetic chemical lawn pesticides,” with the exceptions of “agricultural lands and gardens, golf courses, sod farms, and addressing high-risk noxious weeds and poisonous or invasive species.”

The bill will become law in December 2014 with a one-year grace period, the government said in a news release.

Besides plans to tackle noxious weeds, Gord Mackintosh, minister of Manitoba conservation and water stewardship, said his plan includes a strict integrated pest management program for all government pesticide applications beginning December 2013, consumer and applicator awareness about effective lawn biopesticides and organic practices and consultation with the education and child-care centre sectors to significantly reduce indoor pesticide exposure.

It’s unclear how weeds will be controlled on public property, including along provincial highways, provincial and municipal roads and utility rights of way, Chorney said.

The government has been reviewing the Noxious Weed Act, which currently obliges landowners to control weeds defined under the act as noxious. In an email last week a government official said the province wants to “focus on those noxious weeds that have greater harm to food production.”

Chorney said he fears the province will remove a number of weeds from the act to make enforcement easier.

“Right now there is very inconsistent enforcement across the province,” he said.

Once the proposed bill takes effect only federally approved biopesticides will be legal to use on lawns, driveways, sidewalks, patios, school grounds, playing fields, playgrounds used predominantly by children and health-care facility grounds.

“Medical experts are clear that synthetic chemical lawn pesticides pose risks to human health, especially in the early stages of life, and to pets as well,” Mackintosh said in a release. “We must reduce exposure to these products where they are not needed. Given the increasing availability of replacement products and alternative turf management practices that effectively control weeds, Manitoba is proposing to join most other provinces and more than 170 Canadian municipalities to protect human, pet and environmental health.”

But Chorney said the pesticides on the market were studied by the federal government’s Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency and deemed safe when applied according to label directions.

According to Chorney some of the biopesticides the government is promoting, such as EcoSense, are as toxic as the herbicides being banned outside of farm use.

“The toxicity of EcoSense compared to glyphosate and Killex (2,4-D, mecoprop and dicamba) is identical,” he said. “So what are we really changing here in terms of public protection?

“I’ve also read you have to apply it six or seven times a season to get control. If you’re putting 25 times the product on six times a year how is this safer?”

All pesticides are toxic, but safe when used properly, he said.

Prohibiting the use of pesticides on lawns sends the public the wrong message, Chorney said. If people decide they are unsafe on their grass, they start to question whether they are safe on food crops.

A ban will only drive pesticide use underground, he added, making it even less safe as users won’t have retailers to instruct them on proper use or the proper label when pesticides are transferred to a different container.

And then there’s the issue of enforcement.

“I know the province doesn’t have the resources to have the dandelion police drive around looking for clean lawns and then proving if the guy dug every dandelion out or he sprayed,” Chorney said.

Mackintosh said the emphasis will be on educating the public about the alternatives to synthetic pesticides.

Enforcement will be considered during the drafting of the legislation and regulations, a government official said in a news release.

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Concern that some biofuels create more problems than they solve led to a major policy shift in September when the EU executive announced plans to limit the use of crop-based biodiesel and bioethanol to five per cent of total transport fuel consumption.

Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger on Feb. 22 said the commission’s five per cent proposal had taken into account investments already made, but was not a definitive level.

He told a meeting of EU energy ministers a slightly higher level of say six or seven per cent, as well as looking at biodiesel and bioethanol separately, “might be more in line with the market.”

“We are willing to be flexible,” he said.

The reason some first-generation biofuels are considered problematic is that they increase total demand for crops and displace food production into new areas, forcing forest clearance and draining of peatland. The displacement is referred to as ILUC (indirect land-use change).

In some cases, first-generation biofuels can be worse for the environment than fossil fuels. Another human cost is the risk of stoking food price inflation and land grabs.

“To me it seems a terrible waste of money and food to promote biofuels which are more expensive than fossil fuels, and which do not create significant greenhouse gas savings and in some cases seem to have even higher emissions than fossil fuels,” said Danish Minister for Climate, Energy and Buildings Martin Lidegaard.

He called for changes to the commission plan, including tougher controls on biofuels with the highest ILUC emissions.

The proposal includes ILUC factors to measure the indirect emissions of biofuels made from cereals, sugars and oilseeds, but they carry no legal weight in a watering down of an earlier draft proposal.

Ed Davey, British energy and environment minister, said the commission approach could increase costs, while jeopardizing EU goals to cut climate emissions.

The aim of a goal to get 10 per cent of transport fuel from renewable sources — chiefly biofuels — is to meet a target to cut EU greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 versus 1990 levels, while increasing the share of renewables in the energy mix to 20 per cent.

“Clearly some of the ways that biofuels have been damaging the environment and undermining action on climate change need to be addressed,” Davey said.

However, the commission proposal as it stands is too much of a “one-size-fits-all proposal,” he said, calling for more research and analysis.

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The Global Crop Diversity Trust and the CGIAR Consortium of agricultural researchers said on Jan. 31 that a five-year plan would help secure storage of more than 700,000 samples of crops at 11 existing gene banks from the Philippines to Belgium.

“This will drive the creation of a real global system” to help safeguard food crops, Cary Fowler, outgoing head of the Bonn-based Trust, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The funds will allow the collections to expand, put more information about genetic makeup of seeds on the Internet, and enable duplication of more seeds, partly to ensure that conflicts such as those occurring now in Syria or Mali do not wreck collections.

Plant breeders often need quick access to seed banks to develop new varieties — Sri Lanka, for instance, successfully exploited salt-tolerant strains of rice in a seed bank after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami-flooded coastal paddies.

And researchers are searching gene banks for varieties with natural traits to resist drought, floods, insect pests, disease or extreme heat — all likely to become more common because of global warming.

The 11 seed banks house the world’s largest and most diverse collections of food crops including wheat, maize, rice, potato, banana, sorghum and beans, according to the Trust and CGIAR, formerly known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Both are mainly funded by governments.

Over the past 10 years, the seed banks have distributed more than a million samples to crop breeders and researchers in efforts to improve world food security.

The new $109-million deal is a way to get round what a statement from the Trust and CGIAR called “inconsistent funding” in the past that would create a “firmer financial footing.”

Syria, Mali

Officials recently had to transport seeds from a CGIAR facility in Aleppo, Syria. “The last samples were put on a truck and carried over the border to Turkey just a couple of weeks before fighting broke out in Aleppo,” Fowler said.

Better gene banks are meant to help food security, threatened by price spikes. “If our gene banks suffer, our research suffers,” Frank Rijsberman, head of the CGIAR Consortium, said in a statement.

The Trust also runs a “doomsday vault” high on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, meant to store seeds of all the world’s plants in case of, for instance, a nuclear war. But it is not open for day-to-day research.

“Svalbard was never set up to provide direct access to breeders. It was always a safety deposit box,” Fowler said.

Keeping seed banks is costly because seeds need to be tested for health and replaced when too old. Funds are also needed for conserving plants that produce seeds that are hard to store, such as bananas. The Trust is seeking new ways to freeze seeds, known as cryopreservation.

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Between 1961 and 2007, rising meat consumption and total calorie intake underpinned a 38 per cent increase in the world’s per capita “phosphorus footprint,” the researchers conclude in a paper published online in Environmental Research Letters.

The findings underscore a significant challenge to efforts to sustainably manage the supply of mined phosphorus, a non-renewable resource widely used as fertilizer. When phosphorus is lost through agricultural run-off or sewage systems, it can pollute waterways downstream. In addition, because deposits are heavily concentrated in a few countries, global supplies and prices for the resource are vulnerable to geopolitical tensions.

In recent years, many researchers have explored how human activity has altered the phosphorus cycle in the environment and how management of phosphorus could be altered to ensure long-term sustainability. This new study sheds more light, in particular, on how diet choices have affected the intensity of phosphorus use around the world.

“Our results demonstrate that changes in diet can be a significant part of the strategy for enhancing sustainability of phosphorus management,” says lead author Geneviève Metson, a doctoral student in McGill’s department of natural resource sciences. “In particular, reduced consumption of meat, and especially beef, in countries with large phosphorus footprints could put a big dent in demand for mined phosphorus — since it takes many kilograms of feed, which is fertilized, to produce a kilogram of meat.”

Metson and her co-authors, Professor Elena M. Bennett of the McGill School of the Environment and Arizona State University Professor James J. Elser, computed phosphorus-footprint values based on annual country-by-country diet composition data from the Food and Agriculture Organization. They calculated the total amount of phosphorus applied to food crops for humans and animals by using fertilizer application rates available through the International Fertilizer Association, among other sources. The authors also examined the statistical relationship between economic development and phosphorus-footprint values, and developed scenarios to consider the relative importance of diet changes.

“It is really remarkable how much influence changes in diet have had on our demand for this very limited resource,” Bennett says.

“As research in this area proceeds, it would also be interesting to learn how much of the phosphorus used in food production is able to be recycled and how much is currently reused. Food waste and human waste generally aren’t reused today, but can be a valuable resource if turned into fertilizer or compost for use on nearby agricultural fields.”

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Led by IonE research fellow Deepak Ray, the study team developed geographically detailed maps of annual crop-harvested areas and yields of maize (corn), rice, wheat and soybeans from 1961 to 2008. It found that although virtually all regions showed a yield increase sometime during that period, in 24 to 39 per cent of the harvested areas (depending on the crop) yield plateaued or outright declined in recent years. Among the top crop-producing nations, vast areas of two of the most populous — China and India — are witnessing especially concerning stagnation or decline in yield.

“This study clearly delineates areas where yields for important food crops are stagnating, declining, or never improved, as well as areas where yields are still rapidly improving,” Ray says. “As a result, it both sounds the alert for where we must shift our course if we are to feed a growing population in the decades to come, and points to positive examples to emulate.”

Interestingly, the researchers found that yields of wheat and rice – two crops that are largely used as food crops, and which supply roughly half of the world’s dietary calories — are declining across a higher percentage of cropland than those of corn and soybean, which are used largely to produce meat or biofuels.

“This finding is particularly troubling because it suggests that we have preferentially focused our crop improvement efforts on feeding animals and cars, as we have largely ignored investments in wheat and rice, crops that feed people and are the basis of food security in much of the world,” said study co-author and IonE director Jonathan Foley, professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the College of Biological Sciences. “How can we meet the growing needs of feeding people in the future if one-third of our cropland areas, in our most important crops, are not improving in yield anymore?”

The paper suggests two actions based on its findings. First, it recommends working to maintain the positive trajectory for the 61 to 76 per cent of croplands where yield is still climbing. Second, it encourages crop-producing regions around the world to look at their yield trends and those of others to identify what’s working and what might be improved.

“Previous research suggests that many factors work together to limit yield growth, from cultivation practices to pests to a need for improved seeds,” Ray said. “What this paper does is provide concrete, detailed information policy-makers can use to identify regions where yield growth has stagnated or reversed, figure out what limiting factors are at play, then work to turn that trend around.”

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The areas planted to wheat in the U.S. have declined by 30 to 40 per cent since the mid-1980s. Similar pressures exist in Canada which during the same period, canola acreage has increased, so it now exceeds wheat acres. There also have been important geographical shifts in the composition of crops planted in these countries. Generally, the smaller wheat acreage has been matched with a gradual shift to more northern and western dry areas.

Since 1996, a number of GM traits have been introduced in competing crops. For corn, Roundup Ready (RR), bacillus thuringiensis (BT) and several other traits have been developed and widely adopted. Some of these are now stacked in multiples of three or four traits in a single variety. Looking forward, a large number of traits are under development and expected to be commercialized in the next 10 or more years.

For corn, there are at least 21 new GM traits under development that are a mix of producer-, consumer- and processor-wanted traits. Some of these traits are developed individually and some through joint initiatives. A comparable number and composition of traits is under development for soybeans.

New interest in wheat

Following a number of years in which wheat acres declined in North America and mostly shifted to corn, soybeans, canola and cotton, a number of events unfolded that helped spawn the recent interest in GM wheat. One was an international trilateral agreement among grower groups supporting the development of GM wheat. The other was the sharp escalation of crop prices during 2008. This precipitated concerns by end-users about the longer-term supplies and competitiveness of wheat. In 2009, Monsanto was the first to announce its intent to expand into GM wheat. This was followed within months by announcements to do the same by BASF, Bayer Crops Sciences, Limagrain and Dow AgroSciences. Each of these companies is following work that already had been initiated in Australia by the Victoria Agrobiosciences Center and CSIRO. Indeed, much of the initial and early work was done in Australia, where the initial focus was on drought. This is in addition to the almost simultaneous development of initiatives on GM wheat in China. These firms and organizations have been pursuing varying strategies, including acquiring germplasm and creating public-private partnerships. In addition, to varying degrees, each has made claims about the traits it intends to develop using genetic modification.

Alliances, acquisitions and partnerships

Each of the major firms has sought varying forms of alliances, acquisitions or partnerships to achieve technology improvement goals. The GM traits that are most commonly being developed are yield, drought tolerance and nitrogen use efficiency.

The criteria for selecting these traits are not exactly clear. Most likely, these choices are a result of experiences with other crops, evidence related to current plant stressors, anticipated changing geography of production and concerns of future water availability and cost.

Against this acceleration of research in wheat-breeding technology, there are a number of important issues.

Important issues

One is consumer acceptance. Generally, consumers in North America are less averse to GM content than other countries. In part, this is due to greater confidence in the underlying regulatory mechanisms. In some other countries, notably the European Union and Japan, there is a greater aversion to GM content as reflected partly in their regulatory regimes.

Looking forward, one would expect a more highly differentiated market for wheat products for those that are non-averse to GM content, averse to GM content and those seeking organic produce.

Ultimately, this means that the commercialization of GM wheat will require fairly elaborate segregation systems. While achievable, segregation will need to be initiated by buyers through contractual requirements. If so, the markets can be effective at segregation and at reasonable costs, although the costs will vary across market segments and participants.

Another major issue confronting wheat is that most of the germplasm is or has been under the control of the public sector. Therefore, as biotechnology companies seek to expand and pursue “seeds and traits” strategies, they will need to develop varying forms of public-private partnerships.

The values of these traits provide encouragement for further development. However, the values in wheat traits are not as great as in other crops, which means that any variety of wheat likely would need a combination of stacked traits to be commercially acceptable.

William W. Wilson is a professor in North Dakota State University’s agribusiness and applied economics department.

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To halt or reverse a $22-billion European biofuel industry requires a sound justification.

The problem with biofuels is that calculation of the full environmental impact of their production involves incredibly complicated, tortuous calculations using so-called life cycle assessment.

Probably the best course is to halt growth in the conventional biofuel industry, which produces fuel from food crops, pending better understanding of their full environmental and food price impacts.

That is broadly what the European Commission recently proposed, halving its target for crop-based biofuels to five per cent of road fuel in 2020, equivalent to present production levels.

But problems lurk.

The commission now says some biodiesel is as polluting as Canadian tarsands, which could lead to legislation banning those types of biodiesel. The commission wants to drive a switch to non-food sources for advanced biofuels, but kick-starting this fledgling, alternative industry risks repeating the original errors in supporting conventional biofuels.

Assessment

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to measure the full environmental impacts of economic activity.

The idea is to measure the environmental and other negative impacts of all stages in the production and consumption of goods, as a step towards paring these. In the case of conventional biofuels, the aim is to measure the full carbon emissions from production.

Life cycle stages include cultivation, harvesting and transport of crops and subsequent extraction of sugar for refining into fuel, and, most difficult to measure, the indirect emissions of displacing food crops onto other land, potentially adding to deforestation.

Uncertainties in such assessment include how far higher yields (from farm intensification using more fertilizer, labour and capital) can avoid land use change, including deforestation, as farmers try to produce food displaced by biofuels.

Nigel Mortimer, an LCA practitioner who leads the British consultancy North Energy Associates, says he considers the commission’s latest proposed indirect land use change (ILUC) estimates to be premature.

“Despite many valiant attempts, no such model has yet gained universal acceptance,” he stated.

Even the experts used by the commission acknowledge the complexity of such analyses.

Non-food

Hiking incentives for non-food biofuels also rely on complex accounting.

For example, the commission would allow straw to count four times the equivalent crop-based biofuels.

The justification is that straw is a waste product (or “agricultural residue”) which therefore requires no land in its production and so causes no indirect emissions. But straw is not waste, instead a byproduct of cereal production which has an economic value as animal bedding.

Energy crops such as miscanthus grass count twice, even though it uses land and so potentially displaces food crops in exactly the same way as conventional biofuels.

The result is inconsistent, an attempt both to be science based and at the same time to support advanced biofuels.

That juggling may be the best the commission can do to put the biofuel industry on a sounder footing, but it creates uncertainty, will scare investors and risks repeating mistakes.

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Last month, French President Francois Hollande launched a global campaign to win support for creating strategic stockpiles of food commodities to keep a lid on food prices.

But it would be better to boost food production in the world’s poorest countries, said Andris Piebalgs, the EU development commissioner.

The French proposal, which was backed by the U.N’s Food and Agriculture Organization, did not specify how and where the food stockpiles would be developed. However, analysts have been skeptical about the idea as reserves are costly to run, particularly as grain has a shorter storage life than commodities like oil.

However, Piebalgs said the idea of using food crops for biofuels should be rethought.

“We believe that biofuels should be produced from food residues after crops have been used for providing foodstuff, then the remains can be transformed for second- and third-generation biofuels,” he said.

The EU Commission recently announced a major shift in biofuel policy, saying it plans to limit crop-based biofuels to five per cent of transport fuel.

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The renewed anxiety adds to pressure on the EU’s executive commission to forge a deal this year to help ensure that EU biofuels do not clash with food production or the environment.

Such an agreement would remove some of the uncertainty that has hung over the multibillion-euro bioenergy industry during years of debate.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization last month called for a suspension of U.S. ethanol quotas as a response to the impact of the worst U.S. drought in more than half a century on corn supplies and prices.

Ahead of a U.S. election, immediate change is unlikely. But the polemic highlights concerns that EU goals also stoke commodity volatility because they exaggerate inelasticity of demand.

“The U.S. situation should be a warning for the EU that our inflexible biofuel mandate can lead to food price volatilities, especially as we are currently converting 65 per cent of our vegetable oils into biodiesel,” Nusa Urbancic, program manager at campaign group Transport and Environment, said.

In the European Union, far more than in the United States, the raison d’être of biofuel is to lower carbon emissions. Urbancic and many other campaigners doubt it achieves that.

“Science has also shown that biodiesel can be worse for the climate than conventional oil, once indirect impacts on forests and peatlands are included,” she said.

Action plans drawn up by EU member states predict that bioenergy, including biomass for power generation and biofuel for transport, will provide more than 50 per cent of the EU share of renewable energy as part of 2020 climate goals.

Use of biodiesel — dominant in Europe, while ethanol prevails in the United States — is expected to double by 2020 to 19.95 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe) from around 10 mtoe in 2010.

The EU already has enough refining capacity at more than 22 million tonnes to cope with the projected doubling in biodiesel demand, according to Rabobank.

But it faces daunting challenges in coming up with the investment and technology needed to move to feedstock, such as weeds, grass and waste stems, leaves and husks, that would take the pressure off grain supplies for food.

It also needs to find inputs that would no longer result in the clearing of environmentally sensitive forests and wetlands to plant fuel crops, an issue known as indirect land use change (ILUC).

The costs of moving to new feedstocks are hard to specify because of variables including volatile commodity prices.

“You can compare it with iPad; when it first came out, the price was much higher. But now the price has come down because of large-scale production,” Rabobank analyst Justin Sherrard said.

Policy conflict

EU sources have said the commission will attempt to get agreement before the end of the year on how to measure ILUC.

The aim is to clarify the impact of biofuel policies on displacing food crops or driving unwelcome environmental change.

For now, energy commissioner Guenther Oettinger has opposed raising a target of deriving 10 per cent of transport fuel from biofuels, as part of an overall goal to get 20 per cent of energy from renewables by 2020.

For an industry keen for investment certainty, that means such policy predictability as there is expires in 2020.

Apart from biofuels, bioenergy includes biomass, most commonly made up of wood pellets, for power generation.

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