The Political Economy Of Pesticides: How To Subsidize A Poison – OpEd

By Timothy Terrell 

The “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement is well-known for its skepticism of chemical additives in foods, and of large-scale pesticide-intensive agriculture. With environmentalist and current US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy now leading the movement, many of the long-held concerns of environmentalists about toxins and food quality have found a curious place in the Trump administration. Recent political contests over pesticides have redrawn some of the battle lines. International agrichemical companies, which for many years have promoted policies requiring the use of more of their products, have discovered that Republican support is not a certainty.

Recently, MAHA advocates and some Democrats had reason to celebrate when a provision on pesticide labeling, Section 453, was dropped from a federal funding bill. Section 453 would have granted pesticide manufacturers a federal preemption of state and local restrictions or labeling requirements on pesticides, ensuring that only federal rules apply and shielding pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits alleging harm from their products. Some Republicans who favored the provision had argued that it would avoid “a patchwork of state labeling requirements” and prevent any one state from “establishing the label for the rest of the states,” as Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) contended.

For-Profit Regulation

This argument for federal preemption is an old one. As pesticide use—including the controversial DDT—expanded in the 1940s, large pesticide manufacturers sought federal regulation, but not out of a concern for environmental quality. For them, federal regulation would override the hundreds of state-level regulations that complicated their business. It would also position the federal government to “act as gatekeeper and screen out those fly-by-night operators who might sully the industry’s reputation.” (p. 54). In other words, federal regulation would reduce competition, improving profits.

Federal intervention would also reduce exposure to common law tort liability, which could be useful for pesticide manufacturers or users. Just as these firms were pressing for regulation, the federal government was using deeply-flawed arguments based on economists’ theories of “public goods” to justify massive aerial bombardment of DDT. (“Bombardment” seems especially appropriate a term, since some of the first aerial applications of DDT were from modified World War II bombers). If the government is applying pesticides and can say that it is doing so for a valuable public purpose, the usual common law tort arguments tend to be shoved aside.

It is understandable, then, why large agrichemical companies supported the 1947 Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). Concentrating power in the federal government was a win for them: in the USDA they had a sympathetic regulator that would suppress other, more troublesome regulators—and the federal government was also a large customer that would buy countless tons of their product directly and subsidize purchases by others.

The Excellent Powder

In the mid-1940s, DDT—or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane—was big news in the agrichemical world. As the first synthetic insecticide, DDT replaced more toxic chemicals such as arsenic, and it appeared to have only mild side effects in humans. As a bug fighter, DDT seemed to have no equal, and the Allies used it during World War II to help protect troops from insect-borne malaria and typhus. After the war, it was highly effective in preventing malaria and other diseases around the world. India went from almost one million deaths from malaria in 1945 to only a few thousand by 1960. Indeed, in the first two decades of widespread use, DDT may have saved something like ten million lives globally. One resident of Suriname was so pleased with the application of DDT that he named his son “Daydaytay.”

In the mid-twentieth century, such a cheap and highly-effective insecticide was regarded as something of a miracle chemical, described by Winston Churchill as an “excellent powder.” The Swiss scientist who in 1939 discovered its insecticidal properties, Paul Müller, was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. The idea of banning such a substance—as the EPA did in 1972—would have bewildered most 1940s Americans who faced a real risk of malaria, as well as many others worldwide. Farmers, too, were happy to have a broad-spectrum insecticide to deal with many pests other than mosquitoes. In the period from World War II through the 1960s, however, government took this useful chemical and applied it recklessly and without regard for individual rights.

How to Subsidize a Poison

The Malaria Control in War Areas program of the Public Health Service had begun applying DDT in the American southeast in 1944, the year before DDT became available for public sale in the United States. Two years later, the MCWA became the Communicable Disease Center, later to become the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC’s National Malaria Eradication Program, which began in 1947, promoted the use of DDT through subsidies and widespread spraying. Government spraying programs administered through the Department of Agriculture and local governments coated millions of acres in campaigns against pests like gypsy moths, spruce budworm, and fire ants. The Tennessee Valley Authority sprayed DDT for mosquitoes in the 1940s (a problem which the TVA had a hand in creating, since the project created lakes conducive to mosquito breeding). But the government’s enthusiastic use raised concerns even in its early years. Paul Müller, when invited by the US Army in 1945 to visit the US for discussions on DDT, opined that far too much DDT was being used for aerial spraying. Later, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he emphasized how much remained to be learned about how DDT worked and its effects.

At that point, government was undeterred by such scientific reservations. Government spraying provided job security for federal employees, and chemical companies were happy to have the government endorse, encourage, and buy large quantities of their products. More broadly, agricultural policy that paid farmers to take cropland out of production was encouraging farmers to farm the remaining land more intensively, which entailed the profligate use of insecticides and other chemicals (p. 217).

State and federal government support for DDT was inconsistent, across and even within (see pp. 262-295) agencies. State and local officials tended to be more conservative in their pesticide use than the federal government, and sometimes protested federal spraying. Spraying programs also faced growing opposition from the public. Aerial spraying overrode the property rights of landowners, and once-broad local support waned. In Georgia, farmer Dorothy Colson worried about harm to humans, as well as chicks and honeybees, and campaigned against the chemical after it began to be used for agricultural purposes in 1945 (pp. 71-80). Colson and her sister, Mamie Plyler, wrote a state official at the Georgia Division of Industrial Hygiene, Lester Petrie, asking for help. It wasn’t right “to kill one man’s bees to make another man’s peanuts,” Colson’s sister wrote. But pleas for state assistance were of little help. Colson and Plyler continued to experience health problems, though the arsenic-based insecticide also being used in the area was implicated in Plyler’s illnesses. Meanwhile, the state continued spraying DDT, including over Colson’s property (pp. 94-98).

On Long Island, New York, the USDA insisted on spraying DDT as part of a gypsy moth eradication program, though there was no infestation on Long Island. Residents complained about the oily film of DDT on their cars and houses, and organic farmers complained that their crops had been rendered non-organic. Marjorie Spock—who had repeatedly asked the USDA not to spray her two-acre plot in Brookville—coordinated a lawsuit against the USDA in 1957. Plaintiffs included J.P. Morgan’s daughter Jane Nichols, Teddy Roosevelt’s son Archibald Roosevelt, and other prominent locals (p. 139). The suit charged that DDT spraying deprived the plaintiffs “of property and possibly lives without due process of laws and [took] their private property for public use without just compensation.”

The plaintiffs lost. In his decision, the judge took it upon himself to weigh the costs and benefits of the use of DDT, though there was no way he could have compared these subjective evaluations. The plaintiffs, he said, “failed to show that there was a threat of irreparable damage to them in excess of that which would probably be visited upon the community in general.” In an appeal, the court again placed itself in the untenable position of weighing costs to the plaintiffs and benefits to the general public. The appeal, too, failed. But as Roger Meiners and Andrew Morriss have pointed out, this was inconsistent with how courts treated private applications of pesticides.

Cases from the 1950s indicate that people who sprayed pesticides were liable for damage caused by pesticide drift.… Completely contrary to what happened to the organic growers on Long Island, farmers won cases when pesticide sprays from neighboring farmers made them ineligible for “organic” certification….

Government, however, could spray pesticides with little reason to worry about legal consequences, even as evidence mounted that indiscriminate and excessive pesticide usage was causing significant harm. When a USDA carpet bombing of dieldrin—an organic pesticide similar to DDT (both are organochlorides)—killed over a hundred cattle in Georgia in 1958, farmers became reluctant to pay even part of the cost of spraying. Undeterred, the USDA began offering the pesticides for free. State governments began withdrawing their support, but for a time, the federal government persisted. USDA employees, after all, had incomes tied to the perpetuation of these programs.

Silent Spring

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring was a landmark in the opposition to DDT, and indeed, modern environmentalism. Most memorable is its argument that DDT was interfering with bird reproduction. The book elevated pesticide concerns among the general public, and the challenges to the agrichemical industry became better coordinated. At first, regulatory responses seemed slight. Initially, state and local governments responded, and then the various interest groups gravitated toward federal intervention. There were modest revisions to FIFRA in 1964, removing manufacturers’ ability to sell pesticides that the federal government had rejected, but as Jonathan Adler noted, this was a privilege that manufacturers rarely invoked anyway. It was a small sacrifice, for which manufacturers obtained even greater preemption of state regulation and another avenue for challenging government denial of a product registration (p. 303). Ultimately, the push by national chemical companies for one-size-fits-all regulation and the accompanying competitive advantages led to federalization of pesticide regulation.

Perhaps more importantly, Silent Spring had an impact on the growth of environmentalist interest groups. Organizations which would steer the course of later environmental legislation and litigation were formed in its wake. In 1967, a group of scientists and others formed the Environmental Defense Fund and sued the Suffolk County, New York mosquito control commission after a 5,000 gallon dump of DDT was linked to a fish kill. The case did not succeed in getting an injunction, since it was based on a novel legal argument without foundation in common law or statutory law. But it provided valuable attention for the EDF, which fought DDT until its final ban in 1972 (p. 43, n183).

It may seem odd, but the chemical industry may have had reason to look back fondly on Silent Spring. Environmentalist opposition to DDT might have concerned firms worried about a broad attack on their industry, but there was also an opportunity. DDT was cheap and displaced sales of other insecticides that had been developed. As three scientists pointed outin the prominent medical journal The Lancet, the,

…insistence of environmental advocacy seems to have won approval of powerful pesticide companies because it allows them to sell their more expensive insecticides. The replacement of DDT by organophosphate, carbamate, or pyrethroid insecticides is commonly proposed even though price, efficacy, duration or effectiveness, and side-effects (e.g., an unpleasant smell), are major barriers to use in poor countries. (p. 331)

Some organophosphates, which are related to chemical warfare nerve agents like sarin or VX, are arguably worse for human health than DDT. As the FDA lowered DDT limits on food products in 1968, organophosphate poisonings rose (p. 184). And in some countries, the abandonment of DDT corresponded to a resurgence of malaria. But a “bootleggers and Baptists” convergence of interests between the chemical industry and activist environmentalist organizations could benefit both groups. Just as sellers of illegal alcohol benefited from morally-motivated campaigns to restrict legal liquor sales, the chemical industry might have enjoyed overall gains from those concerned about DDT.

What DDT Teaches Us about Intervention

Environmental and public health concerns have long provided moral cover for government intervention. But a clear-eyed view of government also shows that it frequently works against environmental quality and public health. Which direction will the MAHA movement go? So far, it has been a mixed bag, as far as its approach to government. As Robert Malone has pointed out, “at its core, MAHA is predominantly proregulation.” For example, regardless of what one may think of the effects of food dyes on health, a ban on certain dyes is a regulatory approach to a solution. But, Malone says, “there’s also a deregulatory aspect to the MAHA movement,” as with the acceptance of unpasteurized milk or the opposition to vaccine mandates. There is some understanding in the movement that bureaucracies may be part of the problem.

The DDT story shows us that government intervention to limit toxins or improve environmental quality does not fit a “public interest” view of government. In this view, government acts in good faith to competently protect people and the environment. Though we should ask questions about the science of pesticides, we can have little confidence that good scientific inquiry is driving policy. And whatever the chemists tell us, that information cannot determine what human preferences are or what they should be. Government, in any case, responds to interest groups according to how well these groups can mobilize politically, not according to what best promotes human well-being—which, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out, government planners are not able to determine anyway. The rights of individuals are of little concern to governments that have bureaucracy budgets to protect or industries to subsidize. Harms committed by governments will tend to be immune from the threat of tort liability that would restrain private parties. And decentralization—such as preferring state authority to federal authority—can enhance political competition and slow the erosion of liberty.

Dropping Section 453 means that smaller, more local governments were—for now—able to stave off federal monopolization of regulation, and that lawsuits (a liberty-friendly approach to disputes over damages) remain useful to compensate victims. It may be a win to celebrate, but the interest groups that created FIFRA in 1947, that bombarded cities and fields with DDT, and that steered agricultural policy to benefit bureaucracies and boardrooms have not gone away.

• About the author: Timothy Terrell is T.B. Stackhouse Professor of Economics at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he has taught since 2000. He earned his PhD in economics from Auburn University in 1998. Dr. Terrell is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, where he works on the editorial staffs of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Dr. Terrell’s research focuses on regulatory and environmental policy issues. 
• Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute