Craig Hunter, pesticides watchdog for the Ontario Fruit and
Vegetable Growers Association, is taking issue with a Health Canada report on
Captan.
He says the quality is highly suspect and the report appears
to have been prepared to come to a predetermined decision to ban the continued
use of Captan to control many fungal diseases.
He questions how Health Canada’s reviewers could reach
conclusions completely at odds with their counterparts at the United States
Environmental Protection Agency, European pesticide reviewers and the Canadian
review completed in 1980.
He questions why there is no reference the 1980 study in the
footnotes, yet the authors developed a number of computer models to come to
imagined conclusions about potential harmful effects of using Captan.
Hunter says it would make more sense to use actual hard data
instead of models which have in some cases been stacked one on top of another to develop a
worst-case scenario.
For example, he says it’s possible to gather real data to compare the health of
workers who make and package Captan with office workers who have no direct
exposure to Captan.
For another example, he says Captan has been so widely used for 60 years that it’s possible to track the health of farmers and farm employees
and compare with the general Canadian population.
“Instead ‘models’ of worse case scenarios were used to reach
conclusions that defy common sense,” writes Hunter in The Grower magazine for
fruit and vegetable producers.
He says restricting the use of Captan would raise other
risks, such as the emergence of diseases that would need to be controlled by
narrower-spectrum pesticides, giving rise to an increase in resistant strains
of the diseases.
Hunter also says the civil servants at the Pest Management
Regulatory Agency who wrote the report ought to be identified. They are at the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And certainly Hunter’s opinions are
public. Why not these critics so their track record could be assessed?
Hunter notes that an anti-pesticide bias seems to have
surfaced among the PMRA reviews over the last five years, so he’d like to know
if it’s recent hires who are writing these reports or whether it’s veterans at
the PMRA for whom he says he has a lot of respect.
“Are they afraid to stand behind the decisions over their
names?” Hunter asks.
“In all conscience, this report should be shredded and a new
start made. Anything less is unacceptable,” writes Hunter.
