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Food Supply Threat Seen in Pending Suit: Class-Action Aimed at Pesticide Atrazine

Posted on: Sunday, 12 March 2006, 06:00 CST

By Brian Brueggemann, Belleville News-Democrat, Ill.

EDWARDSVILLE -- A conservative think tank's expert on groundwater says a lawsuit pending in Madison County threatens the nation's food supply.

In a recent essay, Jay Lehr of The Heartland Institute said the lawsuit involving atrazine, a pesticide used for decades by farmers, could "indirectly determine national farm policy" and shrink the U.S. food supply.

The lawsuit filed in 2004 by the Holiday Shores Sanitary District, which operates a water plant in the Holiday Shores area west of Edwardsville, claims atrazine from farming operations has contaminated the lake that supplies water for the unincorporated neighborhood.

The suit, filed by Swansea attorney Steve Tillery and still pending, claims atrazine causes cancer.

"If atrazine were removed from the market out of fear of baseless litigation, our nation would have to return to the farming practices of yesteryear, when yields were less than a third of today's production and diseased crops were the order of the day," Lehr wrote.

"Nearly every type of food would be in shorter supply and their prices would increase. The poor and elderly on fixed incomes would be hit hardest by this result."

Tillery disputed that.

"Atrazine is primarily used on corn crops," he said. "In the U.S., less than 2 percent of the corn produced is consumed as food." Most is used to feed cattle, he said.

Atrazine is an economical pesticide that is used on most corn and grain sorghum grown in the United States. About 80 million pounds of atrazine are used annually in the United States to control broadleaf and other weeds.

Tillery said The Heartland Institute and its report are highly biased, and he called Lehr "an industry guy."

Lehr said he learned about the Madison County case while surfing the Internet. He said he receives a $30,000 salary from The Heartland Institute, but has never been paid by an agricultural interest.

"I've never had any monetary motive in my life," Lehr said. "I've never taken a nickel from the industry."

Tillery is asking the court to certify his lawsuit as a class-action suit on behalf of all water districts in Illinois.

Tillery is no stranger to class-action lawsuits. In 2003, he won a $10 billion verdict in a class-action suit against the Phillip Morris Tobacco Co., but the state Supreme Court later overturned the verdict.

The atrazine lawsuit is against manufacturer Sipcam Agpro, based in Georgia, and Bloomington-based Growmark Inc., which distributes the product.

The lawsuit does not seek compensation for illness. The suit seeks compensation for filtering systems at water plants, compensation for diminished property value and punitive damages.

No specific dollar amount is listed in the complaint.

The defendants argue that regulatory experts, not courts, should determine the level at which atrazine in drinking water is safe.

"The safe level of atrazine in drinking water ... has already been painstakingly and diligently examined and answered by the regulatory agency charged with making such determinations, the U.S. EPA," defense attorneys argued in a motion seeking dismissal of the case.

Lehr said tests performed today on water are so sophisticated that any threat from atrazine or anything else can easily be detected.

The lawsuit claims recent studies show that workers at an atrazine plant in Louisiana had elevated rates of prostate cancer, that atrazine deforms the sex organs of frogs, and that people working in areas of high pesticide application have an increased risk of developing reproductive problems.

Lehr wrote that the suit "relies on a small number of highly suspect" studies.

"This is a standard tactic of alarmists -- to search a huge literature to find a small number of studies that, due to small sample sizes, poor methodology or just random chance, arrive at findings contradicting the rest of the literature," Lehr wrote.

Lehr, the science director for The Heartland Institute and an author of books on groundwater, earned a degree in geological engineering from Princeton University and a doctorate in groundwater hydrology from University of Arizona.

Michael Van Winkle, a spokesman for the institute, declined to say whether the institute gets funding from agricultural interests. He said the institute has a policy against disclosing individual donors, but no single corporation provides a donation that exceeds 5 percent of the institute's budget.

But Tillery provided copies of documents indicating The Heartland Institute has received funding from dozens of corporations, including agriculture companies.

Contact reporter Brian Brueggemann at bbrueggemann@bnd.com or 692-9481.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Belleville News-Democrat, Ill.

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Source: Belleville News-Democrat (Belleville, Ill.)

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