In Canada's potato province, streams run with pesticides

Streams that run through Prince Edward Island's potato country are contaminated with levels of an environmentally-destructive pesticide that exceed federal safety regulations, Canada's National Observer has found. 

Half of the creekside testing sites in the province that have been routinely tested since 2022 contain levels of the neonicotinoid pesticide, clothianidin, in amounts up to 4.5 times greater than the government's safety thresholds, ministry data show. No enforcement action has been taken yet. 

The excessive levels have prompted further investigation by the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), the federal body responsible for pesticide regulation and enforcement in Canada, a spokesperson for PEI's ministry of environment, energy and climate action said in a statement. 

"There have been no enforcement measures taken to date as we are still working to identify the sources of the pesticide levels detected," she wrote, noting provincial officials are cooperating with the federal probe. 

A Health Canada spokesperson confirmed they don't yet know where the excessive clothianidin levels are coming from. 

"Pesticide detections in water may not be traceable to a specific application of pesticide,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Work is underway to identify any sources contributing to exceedances and continued sampling will help determine whether additional investigation and actions may be warranted by the federal or provincial government."

Clothianidin is a neonicotinoid pesticide, a class of insecticides harmful to human brains and sperm and deadly to bees, insects and birds. Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) began regular countrywide testing for over 200 pesticides, including clothianidin, in 2022. Neonicotinoids, or neonics as they are often called, are widely used as a prophylactic coating for seeds – the chemicals are absorbed by the plant, making the plants toxic to pests – and sprayed on crops. including potatoes which are a primary crop in PEI. 

In PEI, the most contaminated samples come from the Wilmot and Huntley Rivers, which flow through farmers’ fields. Two of the sampling sites are adjacent to two potato processing and washing facilities, including one facility that is owned by a major supplier for potato chip giant Frito-Lay. All of the 110 samples taken from those two sites exceeded federal regulations for clothianidin, a pattern not seen elsewhere in Canada.

Andrea Foote, vice president of global corporate communications for PepsiCo, Frito-Lay's parent company, said the corporation has "a pesticide monitoring program to ensure the regulatory compliance of our potato growers." In addition, all its suppliers must obtain a yearly certification to show they know how to apply pesticides and are applying them  "correctly per label and government instructions."

"Farmers only use products registered by Health Canada and they use them only the way they're supposed to, and only when they're needed," said Greg Donald, general manager of the PEI Potato Board. "If there’s an issue, it needs to be addressed."

Province-wide, all 437 samples collected by the ministry contained the pesticide, while 84 per cent contained enough to pose a chronic threat to aquatic organisms. 

Health Canada is responsible for ensuring farmers comply with pesticide safety levels set by the PMRA. The agency has come under fire in recent years for helping pesticide producers undermine independent data to get products on the market, downplaying health and environmental warnings from its own scientists and chronic transparency issues. 

While the sheer number of exceedances in the PEI samples make them stand out, experts say the data highlight widespread contamination problems with neonics. 

"There are exceedances all the time with neonics," said Pierre Mineau, a biology professor at Carleton University and former ECCC scientist. This is because the chemicals are widely used and easily enter the soil or contaminate runoff and creeks, he explained. 

Designed in the 1980s and pitched as a safer alternative to organophosphate insecticides like chlorpyrifos, which were widely used at the time, neonics have become some of the most common insecticides in the world. The water-soluble chemicals are sprayed on crops and commonly used as a prophylactic seed coating that leaches into the surrounding soil, runoff and groundwater. 

But researchers were soon sounding an alarm about the neonics, linking them to dramatic declines in pollinator and insect populations and prompting the European Union to ban them in 2018.

In 2016, Canada proposed a similar neonics ban. However, five years after the announcement ,the PMRA reversed course and opted to allow the pesticides' use to continue, albeit with a few new restrictions. 

An investigation by Canada's National Observer revealed last week that the reversal resulted from the pesticide industry collaborating with officials at the PMRA, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and ECCC to undermine research supporting the ban. With the blessing of a committee consisting of Canadian civil servants and industry representatives, pesticide giant Bayer Crop Science set out to discredit water quality data collected by a University of Saskatachwan professor that showed dangerous levels of neonics in Prairie wetlands.. 

"[Neonics] should never have been permitted, they are linked to catastrophic harm to birds, insects and aquatic invertebrates.  Increasingly, they are being linked to human health concerns as well," said Laura Bowman, a lawyer with Ecojustice who specializes in pesticides, in an email. "The story of how neonicotinoids were allowed to widely contaminate the environment will go down in history as one of the quintessential environmental regulatory failures of the 21^st century.”

Mineau said the cozy relationship between industry and the regulator is reflected throughout the government's safety thresholds and rules for the chemicals. For instance, the federal clothianidin safety threshold for aquatic organisms that was exceeded in most of the PEI water samples is higher than the equivalent rules in the U.S. 

Moreover, the data gleaned from water samples is likely an underestimate of the peak neonic levels, Mineau says. Water samples offer a snapshot of the situation at the time when the sample was collected; they don't give a continuous perspective, meaning there are likely periods with higher levels of the chemicals present, he added. Some species can be harmed by a single exposure to neonics, so even a short pulse can lead to ecological harm, he said.

Mineau slammed the pesticide industry – and the regulator – for downplaying these harms and arguing that because not all insects are impacted equally by the toxic products, their overall ecological impact is acceptable. 

"Do we want a world populated by rats and cockroaches, because they happen to do really well by us?" he said. "Or do we want a rich, vibrant ecosystem that has all of its components?"