23 May 2025, Washington: Today, the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) commission, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, released a report chronicling the causes of rising rates of illness in Americans. Center for Food Safety (CFS) applauds the commission’s report for specifically naming the overuse of pesticides and acknowledging their harms to children and public health as major contributors to America’s “chronic disease epidemic.” However, the report then fails to address the policy and legal reforms necessary to stop this epidemic from continuing.
Statement of George Kimbrell, Legal Director of Center for Food Safety:
“The need to reform our broken industrial agriculture system to build a better future for our food is paramount. The MAHA commission recognizes that the overuse of pesticides in America’s industrial food system is a critical piece of the nation’s health crisis and acknowledges the now well-established scientific evidence of the dire harm these toxins are causing children, public health, and the environment. However, the report falls woefully short of providing any next steps in how the government is going to stop this health epidemic from continuing. Much more is required – and urgently – in order to meaningfully address the twin public health and environmental crises we face. Protecting children’s health and building a healthy food system must trump pesticide corporations’ profits. Policy and governance must be based on sound science and reject fearmongering and lobbying influence alleging that these toxins are needed for a healthy food system or agricultural economy. Our organization will continue to watchdog federal agencies to protect the public interest and ensure regulators comply with their duties to protect public health and the environment from these dangerous toxins. To be meaningful, the findings of the report must translate into concrete actions that truly advance a healthier, more sustainable food system for America’s farmers and consumers.”
CFS has worked diligently for over 25 years to limit the impact of toxic pesticides on America’s food system and link pesticides with their health and environmental damage. Our scientific reports first highlighted pesticides’ driving role in the species extinction crisis, like the decline of monarch butterflies. Our public interest litigation is responsible for the cancellations of numerous notorious insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides. A groundbreaking 2024 settlement required the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the first time to test all pesticides for their endocrine-disrupting effects, which can impair fertility and immune function and cause cancer. In 2022, we achieved a historic victory against glyphosate when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with CFS and overturned the EPA’s decision that glyphosate was safe for humans and imperiled wildlife. As a result, EPA lacks a lawful human health safety finding for glyphosate to support its ongoing use. Another recent sweeping victory was a federal court revoking approval of the notoriously volatile pesticide dicamba, which has caused unprecedented damage to millions of acres of crops and wild plants. Every third bite of food requires bee pollination, and when the bees started dying from a new form of insecticide called neonicotinoids, CFS led the first successful cases challenging their approvals. And for several years CFS has been challenging in court the highly controversial and dangerous herbicide atrazine, a known hormone-disruptor, with exposure linked to birth defects, multiple cancers, and fertility problems.
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