Atrazine Scare Campaign Uses Same Junkscience Playbook as Alar Scare

About the author: Jere White is the Executive Director of the Kansas Corn Growers Association. Connect with Jere on such topics as atrazine, corn and ethanol on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kscornhead.

Robert James Bidinotto wrote an article this week on the spurious attacks on atrazine and highlighted the why consumers and farmers alike benefit from this herbicide. On behalf of the Kansas Corn Growers Association, I applaud Mr. Bidinotto on telling the story and history of the fear-mongering spread by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Mr. Bidinotto begins by recounting how NRDC essentially got the chemical growth agent alar, commonly used on apples, banned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after employing a campaign with actress Meryl Streep which “claimed that alar ‘might’ eventually cause thousands of lifetime cancer cases due to apple consumption by preschoolers. It was later revealed by Bidinotto that NRDC’s “junk science” used experiments which gave lab mice doses of alar that were “so outrageously high that 80 percent of the animals were poisoned to death.”

NRDC is attempting the same fear-mongering tactics with atrazine now and has successfully convinced the EPA to review the chemical for safety just six years after it was re-registered by the same government agency.

Click here to read the rest of Jere’s blog about the Atrazine insanity.