Pesticides, foods, and you.

Four years ago, Congress charged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with an enormous task: Assess some 9,000 agricultural-pesticide uses and when needed, restrict or ban them to make sure that exposure levels are safe, particularly for children.

The effort, a mandate of the Food Quality Protection Act, is expected to take many more years to complete. Consumers Union has analyzed the EPA's progress to date, as part of an ongoing project funded in part by grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Joyce Foundation, and the W. Alton Jones Foundation.

The Consumers Union study, "Report Card for the EPA," shows that the agency has made considerable progress in some areas--such as banning several of the most toxic pesticides for use on some foods and around the home--but it still has a long way to go.

To perform the analysis, Consumers Union used data from the Department of Agriculture and the EPA to create a toxicity index and toxicity-index scores for dozens of fruits, vegetables, and beverages based on the pesticides that government testing detected in them.

The analysis identified 458 pesticide/ food combinations (such as azinphos-methyl on apples) for U.S. produce for which there was federal testing data and gave toxicity-index scores to each of them, based on the amount and frequency of residues and the toxicity of each pesticide. This approach can help determine the relative contributions of different pesticides to overall risk and show which uses of specific chemicals on specific foods pose the largest relative risks. Indeed, the Consumers Union analysis found that the 92 uses with the highest scores, or about 20 percent of the list, accounted for 97 percent of the total score for all uses. These 92 riskiest uses should be obvious priorities for the EPA, the study suggests.

The agency has taken some action. In 1999 the EPA banned for many food uses ...