EPA Issues Rare Emergency Order to Suspend Use of Weed Killer Harmful to Fetuses

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a very rare emergency order on Tuesday to suspend all use of a dangerous weed killer, citing its serious health risks for pregnant women and unborn babies. 

DCPA, or Dacthal, is widely used in California on vegetables such as broccoli and cauliflower — two of Santa Barbara County’s top crops. It is known to cause “serious, permanent, and irreversible health risks” to developing babies, including changes in fetal thyroid hormone levels, which are linked to issues such as low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased IQ, and compromised motor skills later in life.

In 2022, Santa Barbara County ranked fifth in California for DCPA use, totaling nearly 11,000 pounds, according to a May 2024 report by the Department of Pesticide Regulation.

This is the first time in 40 years the EPA has taken such emergency measures. The agency says that pregnant individuals handling DCPA may face exposures up to 20 times higher than deemed safe by current product labels. 

“The EPA’s decision to officially suspend all use of the toxic herbicide dacthal reflects a growing recognition of the harmful effects that such chemicals have on our communities, as well as validates what our farmworkers, who have been in direct contact for a long time, have expressed to be detrimental to their health and their family’s health,” said Erica Diaz-Cervantes, a senior policy advocate with Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy.

“We commend this action and urge continued vigilance in the regulation of hazardous substances to ensure that agricultural practices align with the principles of safety for our farmworkers and ecological stewardship.”

Farmworkers are particularly at risk, but the chemical can absorb into vegetable tissues, so even washing your produce (while a good practice) would not get rid of the toxins below the surface. “Spray drift” into neighboring communities also threatens pregnant women and unborn babies residing near DCPA-treated fields. 

“DCPA is so dangerous that it needs to be removed from the market immediately,” said Assistant Administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention Michal Freedhoff in a statement. “In this case, pregnant women who may never even know they were exposed could give birth to babies that experience irreversible lifelong health problems.”

According to the EPA, the emergency suspension to stop the use of the pesticide and pull it from the shelves comes after “several years of unprecedented efforts” to get DCPA’s California-based sole manufacturer, AMVAC, to submit “long-overdue data” and address the risk this pesticide poses.   

While some growers around the country may feel inconvenienced by the ban and the loss of an effective weed killer, farmworkers and advocate groups are praising the EPA’s decision, if not criticizing the agency for acting faster. The herbicide has, after all, been banned in the European Union since 2009. In addition, previous studies acknowledging the pesticides risks date back to the 1990s.   

As said by Diaz-Cervantes, the process of banning these harmful chemicals is “not fast enough to be able to protect workers,” especially when “workers have developed health symptoms in correlation to pesticide exposure, and yet, that’s something that is still not widely addressed, or even then just validated overall.”  

The agency invoked its authority under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act to suspend the pesticide as an emergency measure while it simultaneously seeks to cancel DCPA products permanently — a process that can take several months to several years to see through due to procedural requirements. 

“As an organization led by farmworker women, we know intimately the harm that pesticides, including dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate (DCPA or Dacthal), can inflict on our bodies and communities,” said Mily Treviño-Sauceda, Executive Director of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, also known as the National Farmworkers Women’s Alliance. 

“This emergency decision is a great first step that we hope will be in a series of others that are based on listening to farmworkers, protecting our reproductive health, and safeguarding our families.”