<b>By KEVIN WALKER<br>
Michigan Correspondent</b></p><p>

SEATTLE, Wash. — For those who work at Earthjustice, the legal arm of the Sierra Club, the pesticide azinphosmethyl (AZM) should have been taken off the market a long time ago.<br>
Earlier this month they went to court again to try and get a judge to order the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to do just that.<br>
“There’s no valid reason to subject workers and their communities to six more years of poisonings,” said Joshua Osborne-Klein, one attorney who filed a motion for summary judgment against the EPA.<br>
If Judge Ricardo Martinez of the western district of Washington state were to grant Earthjustice’s request, AZM could be effectively banned for use on several specialty crops, including cherries, blueberries, apples and pears. Barring any change, the pesticide can be used until September 2012, albeit with a number of new restrictions.<br>
According to Osborne-Klein, the matter will be decided one way or another within a month, possibly within a couple of weeks. The defendant in the case, the EPA, has also filed a motion for summary judgment, which is basically a request to have the case dismissed.<br>
The EPA’s lawyer argued to the judge that the short-term benefits of allowing growers to keep using AZM for the next several years outweigh the potential harm, according to a published report. The attorney, Cynthia Morris, and industry experts say banning AZM now could cripple some of the industries in which the chemical is a mainstay. That’s because alternative pesticides are not currently acceptable to some countries where domestic apples and other fruits are exported.<br>
The backdrop for this latest court action is a lawsuit brought against the EPA by Earthjustice, as well as farm worker advocacy and other environmental groups, in 2004. The groups argued then the EPA should not allow producers to continue using AZM in light of evidence that it can cause serious negative health effects for the farm workers who handle it. The lawsuit was put on hold when the EPA agreed to reconsider its use on a number of crops.<br>
Last November, however, the EPA decided that given the lack of viable alternatives for some crops, producers could continue to use AZM on cherries, blueberries, apples, pears and several other crops until September 2012 with the new restrictions. The environmental and worker groups then reopened the lawsuit in February 2007 to compel the EPA to hasten its phase-out of AZM, as well as two other pesticides – phosmet and chlorpyrifos.<br>
“It is outrageous that EPA allowed continued use of AZM, knowing that it would expose farm workers to unacceptable risks of pesticide poisonings,” Patti Goldman, another attorney for Earthjustice, said last year in a news release after the case was reopened. “Since growers have already had five years to shift to other pest controls, there is no reason to subject workers and their communities to more poisonings for another six years.”<br>
Shelley Davis, an attorney for Farmworker Justice, also spoke at the time: “With safer alternatives already in widespread use, the EPA has betrayed the trust of the men, women and children whose health it is duty-bound to protect, by allowing this extremely hazardous pesticide to remain in use for six more years. It is time to make that shift now.”<br>
The plaintiffs that brought the lawsuit are the United Farm Workers of America, Sea Mar Community Health Centers, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, Beyond Pesticides, Frente Indigena Oaxaqueno Binacional and Arnulfo Lopez, a farm worker in California.