 Happy Friday. I'm Kaui Lukas. We are here at Hawaii is my mainland in the think tech studios downtown beautiful Honolulu. With me this week my guest is Paul Achtoff who is the managing director of Earth Justice's mid-Pacific office here in Honolulu. Paul, thank you. Thanks for having me Kaui. I was so grateful that you were able to come down and talk this week because something kind of big has happened in my opinion this week on Wednesday the Kauai Board of Water Supply approved the nomination of Beth Tokioka and Beth Tokioka is the her day job is for Sinjenta and that seems like that might be an awkward mix for some people. The blogs have been going off on this and so I wanted you because you're very involved at Earth Justice with all these issues around atrazine and pesticide spraying so can you give a little background of what you as the managing director of Earth Justice has been doing around these issues? Sure well Earth Justice has been working on issues relating to pesticides for a long time and and I've been working on issues concerning genetic engineering in Hawaii and elsewhere for quite a few years and most recently I've been working on issues for example defending the ordinances that some of the counties passed to try and get better regulation of pesticides and genetically engineered products. So when I heard about this appointment to the board on Kauai it certainly caught my eye because Sinjenta is a big player on Kauai and Beth has been for a while the doing the communications for Sinjenta I mean she's essentially doing public relations and she's going to continue to do that and and now she's going to be on a board that is responsible for the overseeing the operations of the agency that regulates drinking water on Kauai and considering that Sinjenta is the inventor and primary manufacturer worldwide of atrazine among many other pesticides and atrazine has been responsible for groundwater contamination in countless places including in Hawaii and including on Kauai and including on Kauai it's remarkable to me I mean to me it shows very poor judgment to be putting someone in that position that I think begs for conflict of interest claims when you know with all due respect to Miss Tokioka who I don't know personally and I don't have anything against her personally I can't imagine that she is the most qualified person to be in this position at this time given the combination of her background or lack thereof and her day job as the public relations person for Sinjenta which it certainly potentially could be involved in issues about of groundwater contamination it simply doesn't make any sense to me it has been actually yeah well it's you talk about that well there are many many water boards similar to the one on Kauai that around the United States that have had problems with groundwater contamination from atrazine. Atrazine is an herbicide it's the second most commonly used herbicide in the country after glyphosate American growers use 70 or 80 million pounds of it a year and it's an endocrine disruptor meaning that for example it can turn male frogs into females and it has it's associated with a variety of health issues in people as well ranging from developmental problems hormonal problems reproductive problems and even potentially cancer such as thyroid cancer so you know this is you know it's a it's a toxic chemical and it it has a high potential for groundwater contamination in fact why is that well it's just the nature of the chemical the fact that it's widely used when it's put on to fields and rainfall will will bring it down into the water table and you know some chemicals have a greater or lesser likelihood of going quickly through soil or running off into streams and so forth atrazine seems to be susceptible to that that's the primary reason why it's banned in the european union for example ironically syngenta is a swiss-based corporation so in its home country atrazine is is banned but here it's very widely used a few years ago a lot of these water boards found themselves having to pay a lot of money to filter atrazine out of their water supply and so they sued syngenta to reimburse those those costs there was a class action and syngenta agreed to pay over a hundred million dollars to settle it and kawaii was one of those that was asked whether it wanted to join into this suit and share in the proceeds of this settlement and that went before the very board that miss tokyoka is now on and they approved it and the county got a few thousand dollars out of this fund so it raises a question naturally of well now that she's on the board and she has a a obligation to protect the interest of syngenta her employer how would she vote on issues that relate to syngenta you know she might say well you know i i wouldn't do anything that's unethical if there's a conflict i'll consult with people i'll find out if there's a conflict and i will recuse myself well that you know that may or may not work and i think at a bare minimum what it does is it raises in the mind of the public legitimate questions about how trustworthy the officials are who are responsible for the safety of their drinking water and people shouldn't have to wonder about that that's for sure i mean i just think just on that level on that very human level can i trust the water i'm drinking there i'm i'm i read a little bit around uh beth and she seems to be a very smart woman she has a great background in um in county government she was the mayor's assistant for years she's very familiar with how things run there but i i would not feel comfortable with somebody who is who's that beholding to a chemical company that can affect my drinking water and surely there are other people that's right that's the message that i think is really strange yeah to me it's not so much about beth herself the question is the judgment of the nomination of the nomination and the approval of the nomination only one only one dissenting vote gary hoosier was the only one although uh joanne yuki mora said she had grave concerns she said she was and did in fact vote for her so there's only one right and and it's it's impossible not to consider the fact that we have elections coming up in the fall and that on kawai it's this is a whole question of the agrochemical companies on the one hand and people who are concerned about the effects of their operations on the other it's a very polarized community uh and the they're they're definitely competing efforts to elect people to the county council who have different views on these subjects and so it's hard not to assume that the county council is thinking about this when they're voting on somebody who has a very clear allegiance to one side of this issue and i think it's very unfortunate because you're you're sort of playing politics with public health and you know you look at the board and there are only there are three ex officio members that are on the board because of their other jobs and then there are four at large members you have a banker you have an attorney uh you have someone who's active in the farm bureau who's already uh in that sense representing the interests of big ag in hawaii sure and then you you you don't bring in someone who's a hydrologist someone who is a conservationist someone who with public health expertise you bring in the spokesperson for syngenta to fill that fourth position to me that that really shows questionable judgment and this isn't actually the only issue with kawaii county um that you are and syngenta that you're dealing with you have recently been arguing in front of the ninth circuit court on a well syngenta well as people most people know uh a few years ago in in order to try and get a better handle and greater regulation of the pesticides that are being heavily used on kawaii the county council passed an ordinance uh at the time known as ordinance 2491 that required things like buffer zones uh around sensitive areas uh notification of the public for pesticide spraying uh notification after the fact of where genetically engineered crops had been grown to provide the public with some greater security um and that was passed by the county council but then syngenta along with the other agrochemical companies who have the genetic engineering operations on kawaii sued to set it aside which they won in the lower court and that's been appealed to the ninth circuit court of appeals which heard oral arguments on the appeal just a few weeks ago and we're waiting to hear the outcome of whether in fact that ordinance uh is or is not uh preempted meaning whether or not it actually um is lawful or whether it conflicts uh with state or federal law so that's up in the air right now can you talk a little bit about those arguments with uh in a way that they would be understood by the layperson sure i the argument is is a fairly straightforward one uh it's a question of how much authority the county has as opposed to the state or the federal government um if the federal government decides that it wants to be the only government level of government that can regulate an issue then it can do that it can say only the federal government can regulate immigration we don't want to have every state making up its own immigration laws by the same token if a state says we want to be the only state that regulates pesticide i mean the only uh entity within our state that regulates pesticides we don't want to every county having a different pesticide law it can do that and so the question is is that the fact it did in fact the federal government or the state government carve out pesticide regulation or genetic engineering regulation to be the exclusive within the exclusive authority of the federal or the state government and not leave anything for the county well on that note we are going to go take a little break and come back and see how that relates to hawaii which is our main one aloha my name is justine espiritu and i am the co-host of hawaii farmers series this is my co-host matthew johnson and we are live with you every thursday at four p.m at thinktech hawaii dot com and our show focuses on hawaii's local food community we feature not only the farmers that are producing our food but we also feature the supporters and other folks involved in the community that are trying to promote local agriculture big juggle university of hawaii football team under rolovitch is going to kick butt this season in case you didn't understand me university of hawaii football team is going to kick butt under rolovitch this season so be sure to follow us on thinktech hawaii and hibachi top i'll be at every game and remember aloha bark if you want aloha i'm kawaii lucas and this is hawaii is my mainland today i have the attorney paul achitoff who is the managing director of the new pacific office of earth justice here paul thanks thanks for coming and getting into this this issue that is so so difficult because it's very complex in a technical way the whole chemical thing and and in a political way and it has this way of getting people up in arms and very emotional you know when we go to the that that county ordinance that you were talking about i remember when it passed oh my gosh it was i mean it was the biggest news anywhere and social media and everything it was like there was there was no other news that day and but when you have an emotional issue that is really very scientific and technical sometimes it gets lost in the in in the translation and i've i've seen a little bit of the the the discounting the the science because there's emotion tied to it and i really appreciate you coming in and presenting it in in a more um understandable ways yeah you know you you raise a good point about this the science aspect of this and i find it very interesting and i have uh some science background i'm not a scientist i'm an attorney but um i know how to read scientific journals and i've read hundreds of them uh with respect to the issues that are relevant to the cases that i do i studied science in college and high school and so forth so i'm science literate but on issues relating to say genetic engineering and pesticides what i find is that you have a lot of people who will discount what anybody has to say uh on the basis of you don't know the science the science says it's all safe so you have somebody who purports to be speaking on behalf of science exactly what that is you know we could spend all day talking about but it's sort of like the trump card where people say your views don't matter because the science is on our side and the reality is that the science is far from clear and far from uh demonstrating the claims that people make about safety and right here in kawai there was a uh commission a bipartisan no it wasn't called bipartisan what was it called it was a call the joint fact-finding commission the joint fact-finding commission to to deal with that and it was supposed to kind of address the science part and yet that seemed to not quite satisfy um at the end of the day um well it's a very polarized issue and if any group of people with any credentials regardless of what they are comes out with a position for or against either side on this particular issue in my experience the other side will simply say uh they're biased with the joint fact-finding study i thought under the circumstances they did a very good job and i don't think that they overreached in terms of the conclusions that they made most most of which uh had to do with the reality that there's insufficient testing and monitoring to allow uh anybody to come up with the data that would prove or disprove a lot of the claims that are being made but the industry approach was to say uh that's all nonsense uh it's anti-science you know the science shows there's nothing to worry about the sad thing is that you expect that from industry but when i hear that sort of thing coming from the department of agriculture or any other state entity that concerns me because that demonstrates to me uh that they have taken a political stance to defend the industry and they are not really open to another perspective and more important their job being in the government is to protect the public interest which includes a great deal more than the economic interest of multinational corporations who happen to be doing business in hawaii right now how is this playing out on the ground in the neighborhoods on kawaii is there some kind of protection do we know what's going on i mean you said that there's not much testing being done so what is being done well from my point of view that they they're what's being done as inadequate certainly there there is some i mean you when before you spray a pesticide there is a label which is more than just you know a few sentences it's a it's a lengthy document that describes when you can use a pesticide that EPA has to approve and presumably uh the users of these pesticides have to comply with it it is the law to comply with it however uh for one reason or another that label is not always complied with you know back a few months ago about a dozen syngenta field workers were sent to the hospital because they walked on to a field that had been sprayed with a pesticide known as chlorpyrifos this was over on kawaii about 20 hours before and and they got sick and and were taken to the hospital um and the are you know syngenta's response was something along the lines of well uh you're not supposed to do walk into that area for 24 hours uh and this was too early well they're supposed to be signs and they're supposed to be warnings and all of this the extent to which they complied with those requirements is under investigation right now by the EPA um and that report is presumably forthcoming um but regardless what it shows is that for whatever reason um things happen and whether they're for good reasons bad reasons things happen and we are talking about some very toxic chemicals uh that if used improperly can cause serious harm so you know you talk about the west side of kawaii well you know one of the things that i'm working on right now is uh about two months ago we gave notice to ADC the agribusiness development corporation said you know you are discharging uh millions of gallons a day of polluted water through a canal system that goes all through west kawaii 40 miles of open water canals that drain the agricultural fields out there and it goes right into the beach okay so we're done that it's beach there are a number of beaches all along the west side of kawaii near kakaha and why man you've got millions of gallons a day of dirty water and it goes through the town and there are a variety of pollutants including pesticides and other pollutants that are known to be in this water and they are they used to have a permit under the clean water act that allowed them to discharge subject to certain restrictions they're no longer doing that they no longer have a permit and the department of health uh is allowing them to do that and it says oh you don't need a permit we believe that that violates the clean water act and we told them unless they get a permit we're going to sue them so the agricultural uh isn't that part of uh agribusiness development corporation is a state agency that is uh associated with the department of agriculture and they are responsible they one of the things they do is they manage thousands of acres of agricultural land and they're responsible for developing agriculture in the state so at some point they needed a permit to do this but now somehow they think they don't right right we have a difference of opinion it'll be up to a judge whether there's a permit or not i would certainly like to see some action taken besides getting a piece of paper that says you can do this is there some way of well the paper wouldn't just say you can do this the paper would say you can do this subject to certain restrictions that say how much of each pollutant you can allow you have to test regularly and you have to report those test results regularly and those test results are public records so anybody who wants to see them knows what's in the water and if there's an exceedance of some uh pollutant uh they can be subject to penalties so it is regulated and there are many of these permits they're known as NPDES permits uh around the country that is how our clean water act works when pollution is discharged into water bodies and for years ADC did have such a permit but then it decided that uh it didn't need one um do you is there any reason to believe that they are taking the steps necessary to to test the water and make sure that it's safe as as it's being discharged without the permit uh do we know i i don't know clearly to my knowledge they have no under their view they have no legal responsibility to do so whether they're voluntarily doing it what they're testing for how they're doing it i wouldn't know all i know is that you know they're they claim not to have that that legal duty wow well this is a upsetting little surprise i must say uh i think we'll have to do a little follow-up on this one wow that is those are some really large numbers that you um put out there as far as how much water we're talking about going right out into the ocean right and it's essentially untreated it's i mean if you go over to that area you will pass big muddy ditches uh mile after mile that just discharges into right out right into the beach and these is runoff from actively um uh worked agricultural fields where there are chemicals being applied it includes water from that and it it drains a large area that includes active agricultural fields also includes fields that are not in agricultural use there are various industrial uses um and a variety of pollutants that end up in this ditch system hmm well paul we've got two minutes left and we were going to talk about the dark act i don't know if you have anything you can say about that in two two minutes that i can try uh so what you're referring to is a bill that is on president obama's desk that has passed the house and the senate which uh requires labeling of foods that have some genetically engineered uh ingredients um and it and it's designed essentially by the industry the the the food processing industry to preempt a vermont law that was passed requiring uh labeling of genetically engineered foods so that they wouldn't have to comply with that they pushed a bill that provides for labeling nationwide but it's extraordinarily inadequate um instead of saying you know this contains genetically engineered ingredients which is what anybody would expect right um it has a qr code which is that little uh sort of square um icon that you may see on certain things that has to be scanned with a smartphone in order for you to have any idea what that qr code even means there's no explanation it doesn't say anything about genetically engineered ingredients it just has a code if you don't have a smartphone or you don't know what to do with that code um it's of no value to you at all and there are 64 percent of americans who don't even have a smartphone uh paul thank you so much for coming here today to talk on hawaii is my mainland and thank you so much for the work that you and earth justice are doing to protect us thanks for inviting me