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New herbicides approved for major US crops amid health concerns and legal battles.
The Environmental Protection Agency has cleared two fluorinated pesticides never before sprayed on American soil for use on the country's two biggest food crops, corn and soybeans.
The approvals of diflufenican and epyrifenacil were announced by the Center for Biological Diversity on 30 June 2026, alongside expanded food uses for a third fluorinated insecticide, bifenthrin, and the first US food registration of the plant regulator chlormequat.
Campaigners describe all of these as long-lasting compounds tied to serious health harms, a characterization the EPA firmly rejects. The clearances landed five days after the Supreme Court sharply curtailed Americans' ability to sue pesticide makers over cancer warnings, sharpening a fight that has split the president's own base.
The EPA registered diflufenican and epyrifenacil for use on corn and soybeans, with epyrifenacil also approved for wheat. Both are new to the American market and had not been sprayed on any US crop before this decision.
Corn and soybeans together cover more than 70 million hectares of American farmland each year, so the reach of the approvals is vast. Both are herbicides used to kill weeds rather than insects, and each is expected to leave residues that linger well beyond a single growing season.
On the same day the agency broadened the use of bifenthrin, an older fluorinated insecticide, to coffee, kiwifruit, peas, kale and broccoli. It also approved the first US food use of chlormequat on wheat, barley and oats, a growth regulator already detected in the urine of roughly 90% of Americans and linked in studies to reduced fertility and reproductive toxicity.
The approvals arrived after Kyle Kunkler, a former lobbyist for the American Soybean Association, was installed as deputy assistant administrator for pesticides. The soybean association had lobbied in favour of both new herbicides through the public docket. They mark the third and fourth PFAS pesticide clearances under the current administration, following cyclobutrifluram and isocycloseram.
A Contested Definition Of What Counts As A Forever Chemical
The central scientific dispute is whether these compounds are PFAS at all. In a formal fact check published on 26 November 2025, the EPA said single fully fluorinated-carbon compounds are not forever chemicals and pose no safety concern when labels are followed. The agency notes its 2023 PFAS definition, set under the Biden administration, deliberately excludes molecules with only one fluorinated carbon.The Center for Biological Diversity counters that the pesticides meet a broader PFAS definition endorsed by more than 150 researchers and used by nearly every US state. It says the EPA quietly removed a reference to that competing definition from its own website weeks after publishing it. The group also points out that diflufenican and epyrifenacil break down into trifluoroacetic acid, a persistent water contaminant that the European Chemicals Agency has recommended be classified as toxic to reproduction.
Regulators abroad have already drawn harder lines. Denmark has banned diflufenican over its contribution to groundwater contamination, and epyrifenacil has never been cleared for use in Europe.
On the cancer question, the EPA rates epyrifenacil as 'not likely to be carcinogenic' at low doses, yet the pesticide causes liver tumours in animal studies, and a diflufenican breakdown product shares a toxicity profile with aniline, a compound the agency itself classifies as a probable human carcinogen.
Supreme Court Ruling Narrows The Path To Sue Pesticide Makers
The timing has amplified the alarm. On 25 June 2026 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts state failure-to-warn claims. Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh held that state juries cannot force a pesticide label to carry warnings 'in addition to or different from' those the EPA approves.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissented, writing that the decision 'misunderstands FIFRA's requirements' and leaves the plaintiff without a remedy. The case grew from a Missouri jury award to farmer John Durnell, who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma after decades of Roundup use. Bayer welcomed the ruling as good for regulatory clarity, and analysts expect it to close out most of the roughly 100,000 pending Roundup claims.
Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the fresh approvals 'a national outrage' coming days after the court 'limited the American people's right to sue pesticide companies.' He argues the agency has approved hundreds of poisons it has itself linked to cancer. The EPA maintains its reviews follow gold-standard science and that the compounds are safer than the older chemicals they replace.
Whether the courts, Congress or a fractured Make America Healthy Again movement can reopen the door the EPA has just widened will now shape what ends up on America's dinner plates for a generation.
SOURCE: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/epa-approves-new-fluorinated-pesticides-1806171
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