Food Quality Protection Act

The Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), or H.R.1627, was passed unanimously by Congress in 1996 and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 3, 1996. The FQPA standardized the way the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would manage the use of pesticides and amended the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act. It mandated a health-based standard for pesticides used in foods, provided special protections for babies and infants, streamlined the approval of safe pesticides, established incentives for the creation of safer pesticides, and required that pesticide registrations remain current. One of the most prominent sections of the act, the specified protections for babies and infants, was the topic of the National Academy of Science's 1993 report, Pesticides in the Diets of Infants & Children. The EPA has cited this report as a catalyst for the creation of the FQPA. Legislation similar to the FQPA was drafted and presented to Congress in 1995 but was never acted on. In 1996, the political landscape had changed and new pressures to act on pesticide control reform surfaced. In 1991, a coalition of environmental groups sued the EPA for failing to enforce the Delaney clause. The Delaney clause, an amendment of the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, banned all food that contained any trace amount of any pesticide that may cause cancer. Although the EPA argued that the legislation was outdated and should not apply to the current situation, the coalition won in 1995 and the EPA was slated to ban 80 pesticides in late 1996. Under these new, more urgent circumstances, Congress was able to pass a bill that was celebrated by both sides of the debate; farmers, food processors and pesticide manufactures were glad to see the Delaney Clause go, while environmental groups and consumer advocates were pleased to have a formalized safety standard with an added emphasis on children. John Cady, president of the National Food Processors Association, praised the legislation for being '...based on modern, real-world science'. The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 has the following requirements: The FQPA established a new safety standard (reasonable certainty of no harm) that must be applied to all food commodities. In addition to the new standard the EPA now has to consider the specific risks pesticides might have for infants and children. The FQPA required the re-testing of all existing pesticide tolerance levels, of which there were more 9,700, within 10 years. When assessing this risk the EPA is required to take into account the 'aggregate risk' (the exposure to a pesticide from multiple sources) and the 'cumulative exposure' to pesticides with similar mechanisms of toxicity. To do this the EPA is required to establish new science policies to assess the risks. The FQPA requires the EPA to set tolerances for pesticide uses that fall under section 18 of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (emergency exemptions). The EPA has established guidance for assessing the cumulative risk for multiroute exposures to pesticide groups determined to have a common mechanism of toxicity. The Agency has also published guidance on determining whether chemicals share a common mechanism of toxicity, i.e., whether they can be assessed as a common mechanism group. The risk calculation is based on dose addition, where individual pesticide exposure levels are scaled by their relative potency and then summed. Some key uncertainties in this approach include the possibility that relative potency changes with dose, and the potential for toxicological interactions (dose addition assumes no toxicological interactions). Another caution is that the resulting risk assessments are not complete environmental health evaluations of all chemical exposures, but only represent risks from those common mechanism pesticides. The FQPA mandates that the EPA expedite the approval of reduced risk pesticides. To be considered reduced risk pesticides must have a proven low-impact on human health, have low toxicity to non-target organisms and have a low potential to contaminate groundwater.