All Policy and Regulatory Reform Posts

Is a Weed Management Trainwreck Around the Corner? – Reflections on the “Superweeds” Wake Up Call in the New York Times

In the mid-1980s when I was the Executive Director of the Board on Agriculture in the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), I had the privilege of working with some of the nation’s top weed scientists who had already become concerned over excessive use of herbicides. They wrote the weed management …

Time to Slow the Spread of Resistant Weeds by Speeding Up Adoption of Integrated Weed Management

By Tom Green, HHRA Board Chair and Charles Benbrook, Executive Director In the late 1990s Wisconsin soybean farmers eagerly adopted the Roundup Ready (RR) system of weed management. About 40% of the State’s soybean crop was planted to RR soybeans. On 70% of these fields a single application of Roundup achieved season-long control, …

HHRA Commentary Recommends Four Steps to Fix Systemic Problems with Pesticide Regulation

Scientific uncertainty and controversy go hand-in-hand in our nation’s efforts to prevent adverse public health and environmental impacts from the pesticides applied by farmers, ranchers, foresters, landscapers, and groundskeepers. Significant progress has been made in the sciences supporting pesticide risk assessment and regulation. But serious gaps persist between real-world adverse …

New, Comprehensive Study Demonstrates DNA Damage from Real-World Pesticide Exposure

HHRA research partners at King’s College in London and the Ramazzini Institute have published a new study that suggests that regulatory risk assessments may be missing the mark on pesticide health impacts. The study uses the latest multi-omics analytical methods – meaning that it looks at the impact from pesticide …