White House Seeks Pesticide Use Reforms : Health: Congress will be asked to replace law banning all traces of cancer-causing pest controls in food. Proposal allows ‘negligible risk.’

The Clinton Administration is preparing to recommend that Congress replace the controversial federal law banning all traces of cancer-causing pesticides in food with a less absolute standard, according to briefings being given to various parties in the dispute.

The ban, embodied in the Delaney Clause of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, would be dropped for a “negligible risk” standard, which would prohibit the use of pesticides that present a strong cancer risk while allowing levels of pesticide that theoretically could cause one increased cancer case per million.

The proposed pesticide standard, long sought by agriculture and food manufacturing interests and even many environmentalists, is part of the wide ranging plan to reform pesticide regulation promised by Clinton and EPA Administrator Carol Browner.

Other parts of the draft reform package include streamlined pesticide registration rules to speed new, safer pesticides to market; regular safety reviews, and a faster response by regulators when new information turns up about the health effects of a pesticide.

“Our goal is to move to a health-based standard--based on actual risk--at the same time we’re moving safer pesticides onto the market more quickly and removing or eliminating the dangerous ones more quickly,” EPA spokeswoman Loretta Ucelli said Thursday.

Apparently yet to be decided is how conflicts between state and federal pesticide rules would be resolved.

The final Administration package will be presented Sept. 9 at a joint hearing of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee and the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health and environment.

The Administration decision to end the ban is a key moment in the national debate over environmental and safety laws that critics have long said make more emotional than scientific sense.

“Everyone realizes that pesticide regulation is obsolete. The question is replacing it with something genuinely more effective, not just weaker,” said David Roe, a senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The fundamental problem with the system we’ve got now is it’s tough in theory but it’s dead in the water in practice.”

Roe cited a clogged safety research program--”a huge pile of unfinished homework”--that leaves consumers and regulators unaware of the effects of hundreds of potentially toxic pesticides.

“Delaney was written before we were really capable of doing the kind of risk analysis that would tell you how much of which chemicals posed what kind of harm,” Roe added. “We’re a lot better at it now. And Delaney only deals with cancer. Since 1958, when Delaney was adopted, there are many other serious toxic risks from pesticides that we’ve learned about.”

Some environmentalists defend the Delaney Clause, however.

Jay Feldman, executive director of the Washington-based National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, contends that government policy should be to eliminate all use of pesticides that have been shown to cause cancer, no matter how small the risk from trace residues.

“Nothing that has transpired scientifically serves to undermine the validity of the Delaney concept--that there is no safe level of carcinogens,” Feldman said Thursday. “We can meet our pest-management goals . . . without dependence on cancer causing pesticides.”

The Delaney Clause was not vigorously enforced until a 1992 ruling in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a stricter interpretation of the clause. The court-imposed threat of a complete ban on chemicals that growers say they need has quickened the search for a new pesticide regulation system.

The Administration proposals “may break the legislative gridlock on food safety issues that we’ve been stuck on for the last few years,” said Jeffrey Nedelman, a spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers Assn., with members that produce 85% of the food in the nation’s supermarkets.

“The Clinton people have taken on a very difficult issue and have tried to look at the best scientific approach to follow,” Nedelman said. “The best science ought to prevail and the chips will fall where they may on individual chemicals.”

On June 25, the Administration announced its commitment to reduce the use of pesticides and to promote pesticide-free agriculture, though officials said at the time that they did not think that present levels of pesticide use posed a threat to public health.