The Naples News this weekend published an article about a Florida tomato grower lamenting the cost of the new EPA rules regulating five soil fumigants (Our position: while this is a welcome step these fumigants are such highly toxic chemicals --one is already banned under the Montreal Protocol because it's an ozone depletor but it's still in use in the United States-- that we feel the ruling still doesn't go far enough.)

The Naples News article is about how growers, especially small farmers, will be find it difficult to afford to comply with the new regulations, implying that while it may seem like such regulation of toxic chemicals is a good thing, in the end it's the small farmers who are hurt.  This myth must be de-constructed.

There is an old rule of thumb for success in the business world: externalize your costs and internalize your profits.  It means that, as much as possible, you should get other things/people to take up your cost of doing business while at the same time, of course, keeping the profit to yourself.  Factories, for example, can "externalize" the cost of producing widgets that require a toxic ingredient onto the environment if they dump the waste into the river instead of having to pay someone to properly dispose of it.  The river then helps reduce the factory owner's cost of doing business, sort of like a subsidy.  Nothing, however, is free and the ones who will pay the price of the dumping are the people and wildlife who depend on that river.

In the same way we have to realize that if we look at their true cost, pesticides really are expensive.  Until now the growers using these fumigants have been externalizing the costs of these chemicals onto the environment, including the people in the neighborhoods and schools nearby and onto the workers who work in their fields.  These costs have always been there.  What the regulations change is who has to pay for them.

Hopefully the growers who use these chemicals will be forced to realize the true costs of their business model and decide that it is indeed more beneficial to their bottom line to go green!

By the way, like all proposed regulations changes, these are open for public comment for a period of 60 days (beginning July 16th) after which the EPA will issue their final decisions.  The new regs are expected to take effect sometime in 2010.