Pesticide Fines

Pesticide Fines. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Three pesticide distributors working in Washington State will be fined over $35,000 according to Derrick Terada, EPA Pesticides Program. TERADA: What they were, were two products that were unlabeled when they entered the United States and so we caught them at the port. We knew what they were because they submitted MSDS sheets with the products but when we opened up the containers they had no labels, they had no physical labels on the That was the case with Axss USA but there were also violations by both Pace International and Skyline Chemical. TERADA: The Pace one was a little bit different. It had a plain label but it needed to have a more detailed label so I guess in both it would be they both were not labeled. According to Terada it is pretty much standard operating procedure for pesticide companies to import pesticides from places like China and if the products are not labeled or happen to be illegal pesticides the EPA will take action. TERADA: We would fine them and we would stop the sale of the product so it's a standard thing, whenever we see a problem with an import we'll stop the sale of it and so we'll dictate where it can go to and it will go to a certain place and we'll have them prove to use that they have relabeled the product in accordance with our regulations. Once they have relabeled the product in accordance with our regulations and have paid the fine they're able to distribute the product as they were normally going to. That means a lot of people hurrying around to get the problem fixed so they can move that product. Terada says though that there is no way to monitor all of the imported materials. TERADA: We're out at the ports a lot and so because our regional office is in Seattle we have the ability to go out there rather quickly. Every import of pesticide that comes into the region 10 which is Idaho, Oregon, Alaska and Washington they all have to be sign off by someone out of this office and I'm the import coordinator so I'm usually the one who signs off on the imports of products and so we kind of have an idea of what's coming in before it gets here. And so when we see something that has not been imported prior or if it is an unusually large quantity, we'll arrange with the port to have it inspected. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.