Dear Supporter,

Well over a thousand of you emailed your Senators and Representatives over the past 24 hours urging them to remove the proposed study on sulfuryl fluoride from the Farm Bill. Thank you for taking the time to help us with this important campaign. Your emails and phone calls have already helped defeat three separate attempts by Dow AgroScience to pass pro-sulfuryl fluoride legislation. But to ultimately be successful we have to maintain our momentum.

If you haven’t already contacted your elected officials then please Email your Senator & Representatives using our automated system.

If you have emailed your legislators, then please take the next step and Call your Elected Officials. Congressional staffers have told us directly that phone calls are 100 times more influential than emails, and that the staff does take note of and report constituent positions on issues to their superiors when they receive a lot of phone calls. When they pick up the phone, or when the answering machine beeps, say:

“My name is ____ and I live in (your town, state), and as a constituent I want to urge (Representative/Senator name) to oppose Section 9016 of H.R. 2642, the Farm Bill, dealing with sulfuryl fluoride for the following 4 reasons:

-To save taxpayer dollars because the proposed study has already been performed by the EPA,

-To refuse to weaken the integrity of the Food Quality & Protection Act of 1996,

–To protect our children from further over-exposure to fluoride, and

-To protect and support government agencies that actually do their job to protect the public from undue influence from companies like DOW.”

Here is a list of the special committee members currently negotiating the final text for the Farm Bill. Please check the list for your elected officials.  If you see any of them on the list please make a special effort to email and call both their D.C. office and their local district office. Also urge your local friends and neighbors to sign on to our letter by sharing the following link on your social media and in emails:

http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2477/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=14510

Background: In January 2011, in a momentous decision, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Division of Pesticides bravely thwarted Dow and accepted all of the Objections submitted by three advocacy groups who worked together on this issue (Environmental Working Group, Beyond Pesticides and FAN) and proposed to phase-out sulfuryl fluoride as a fumigant.

We successfully argued that according to an Act designed to provide more protections to children’s health from pesticides (the 1996 Food Quality and Protection Act), the estimated exposure to a new pesticide combined with any background exposure should not exceed a safe reference dose. The trouble for Dow is that sulfuryl fluoride breaks down rapidly to fluoride in the human body and millions of American kids are already exceeding the designated safe reference dose for fluoride without any additions from sulfuryl fluoride.

CURRENT SULFURYL FLUORIDE TEXT IN BILL

The Proposed Study included in the House version of the Farm Bill:

SEC. 9016. Not later than two years after the date of enactment of this Act, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, in conjunction with the Secretary of Agriculture, shall submit to the Committee on Agriculture of the House of Representatives a report on the potential economic and public health effects that would result from finalization of the proposed order published in the January 19, 2011, Federal Register (76 Fed. Reg. 3422) pertaining to the pesticide sulfuryl fluoride, including the anticipated impacts of such finalization on the production of an adequate, wholesome, and economical food supply and on farmers and related agricultural sectors.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr2642ih/pdf/BILLS-113hr2642ih.pdf

Stuart Cooper

FAN, Campaign Manager
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