Underlying motives fuel pesticide bills
It’s that time of year again in the Legislature.
In the session that’s just a couple of weeks old, 29 pesticide-related bills have been introduced, but many use stealth techniques to attack the cultivation of genetically engineered crops in addition to further restricting pesticide.
That’s one less than during the last session, though it’s not really progress. Some of the new ones have made it through at least one committee.
In their bill titles, many seek to ban one pesticide, in particular — chlorpyrifos — or require greater disclosure of pesticide use or creation of pesticide buffer zones.
But down toward the bottoms of many of these bills comes the language for which they are really intended. They seek back-door bans on GMO farming by creating requirements for growing crops indoors or requiring a “moratorium” transparently intended to be permanent. They seek to impose pesticide buffer zones that would remove thousands of acres of land from cultivation, without offering evidence to support the scale of such buffer zones.
One of them, Senate Bill 2874, starts out saying that “Hawaii has become a location of increasing commercial agriculture operations that utilize genetically engineered crops.” That’s true, as far as it goes, but it ignores two realities. One is that there is no body of legitimate scientific evidence that GMO crops are anything to be scared of. But more important, bill language in much of this legislation also seeks to rein in large-scale “commercial agricultural operations” of any kind which, ironically, Hawaii needs more of, not less.
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