[View Point] Pesticide sales on the Internet: Time for action

As frequent visitors to our Web site know, one of the favorite topics of discussion on PCT’s message board (www.pctonline.com/
messageboard) is the sale of professional-use pesticides on the Internet. It’s a topic that always generates heated discussion among our message board participants. Unfortunately, up until now, not much has been done — other than lots of grousing — to address the issue, not because it’s not important to the future of the industry, but because the Internet remains a "brave new world" for so many in pest management.

That’s one of the reasons we decided to address this controversial topic in the pages of PCT magazine (see "Digital Dilemma," pg. 54). PCT has spent the past several months interviewing a broad range of industry stakeholders about this complex issue, including regulatory personnel, association officials, product manufacturers, Internet resellers and PCOs. What we discovered is the Internet has changed the rules when it comes to who has access to "professional-use" products. The comments of Tim Creger, chair of the IT Committee of the Association of American Pest Control Officials, are typical of many industry representatives grappling with this issue: "We sat back and watched the phenomenon of e-commerce blow up in our face in the late ’90s," he says. "It caused huge transactional violations of FIFRA."

For the manufacturers, Internet product sales are more of a hassle than they’re worth. It’s not something they’ve actively pursued and, contrary to popular belief, the sale of professional-use products over the Internet contributes little if anything to their bottom line. Yet they’ve been forced to allocate significant time and resources to track their products along the supply chain, addressing a variety of troublesome stewardship issues in the process.

So, what should be done? As the National Pest Management Association (NPMA) indicated in a comment paper to EPA earlier this year: "...there are a number of products whose toxicity alone does not justify a restricted use classification, but where we believe it is appropriate to limit the sale and use of the product." These include where the use pattern is sufficiently difficult that an untrained individual is likely to misuse the product, and/or where a particular use pattern has the potential to present significant health or ecological hazards if applied by an untrained individual.

"The application of termiticides is a prime example of a use pattern that is so difficult that it is inadvisable for an untrained person to apply the product," observes NPMA Senior Vice President Bob Rosenberg. "Even the most skilled ‘do-it-yourselfer’ is unlikely to possess the application equipment or be capable of using the product in accordance with label directions." That’s why the NPMA recently recommended that EPA adopt and enforce the following uniform label statement: "For Sale Only to and Use Only By a Certified Applicator or Person Working Under the Direct Supervision of a Certified Applicator." "This language tracks the exact language of FIFRA and every state pesticide law and eliminates any ambiguity about who may sell or use the product," Rosenberg says.

As recently as August, the NPMA and the Association of Structural Pest Control Regulatory Officials (ASPCRO) met with EPA on this issue. The meeting resulted in an acknowledgment that the sale of professional-use pesticides on the Internet is an issue that needs to be addressed, and sooner rather than later. "I felt very good about the response we got," says Jim Wright, chair of the ASPCRO Stewardship Committee. "I felt the responses were very positive. It wasn’t a discussion about what they couldn’t do, but was more along the lines of ‘What can we do?’" And after months and years of relative inaction, that’s certainly a step in the right direction.

The author is Publisher of PCT magazine.