Midas’ Not-So-Golden Touch: On the Demise of Methyl Iodide as a Soil Fumigant in California

Abstract

The demise of the soil fumigant, Midas, was heralded as a major environmental movement achievement, when Arysta LifeScience eventually deemed it economically non-viable and withdrew from US markets just before resolution of a lawsuit. Building on scholarship that focuses on strategy to understand how social movements sometimes win, we show how activist tactics were able to exploit the missteps of their opponents. These included the unreasonable expectations of Arysta for grower adoptions, the foibles of the director of California's Department of Pesticide Regulation in registering the chemical, and the reluctance of California's strawberry industry to discontinue use of methyl bromide. Although activist tactics, such as public comments and protests, had only a modest impact on the regulatory process, they had a major impact on grower adoptions of the chemical. This, together with a lawsuit that was not going well for the defendants, ultimately led to the withdrawal. Still, there was a great deal of luck involved, especially in the lawsuit in which the judge made rulings and statements favourable to the plaintiffs. Here, ‘scientization’, worked in favour of the movement rather than the industry.

Key Words:

• Social movement strategy
• environmental movements
• methyl iodide
• pesticide regulation
• strawberry industry

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the comments of several anonymous reviewers who inspired many improvements to the original manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Rather than asking what caused the movement to reach its goals (in which case, the anti-biotechnology movement would have seemed to fail), they ask what the degree of commercialization would have been for genetically engineered crops without the movement.

2 The lawsuit was filed as Pesticide Action Network of North America vs. California Department of Pesticide Regulation with the Superior Court for the State of California, Alameda County, on 30 December, 2010. Records of the lawsuit can be obtained from the court or possibly through the plaintiff's attorneys.

3 The parties ended up settling on attorney's fees, albeit with Arysta putting up a bigger fight than DPR.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation, Award #s 1228478 and 1262064.