Pesticides

Better Data Can Improve the Usefulness of EPA's Benefit Assessments Gao ID: RCED-92-32 December 31, 1991

Recently introduced legislation calls for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to base regulatory decisions about pesticides solely on the potential risks they pose to human health and the environment; the practice of estimating their benefits would be discontinued. This report evaluates EPA's methods for conducting benefit assessments. Specifically, GAO examines the role of benefit assessments in EPA's special reviews--in-depth analyses of the benefits and risks of already-registered pesticides that new evidence suggests may pose an unacceptable risk. GAO also determines the extent to which benefit assessments are based on adequate data, disclose any limitations, and adequately consider alternative ways of controlling pests.

GAO found that: (1) EPA primarily considers risk assessments in its reviews of already registered pesticides, and uses benefit assessments in a secondary role to help it to decide to cancel or restrict certain pesticide uses; (2) the quality of benefit assessments suffered because of poor, imprecise, or missing data, misleading analyses that do not acknowledge limitations, and incomplete analyses that do not consider promising pest-control alternatives; and (3) EPA could improve its benefits assessments by using more and better data on pesticide usage and comparative product performance, but EPA stated that it was difficult to obtain reliable data.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Team: Phone:


The Justia Government Accountability Office site republishes public reports retrieved from the U.S. GAO These reports should not be considered official, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Justia.