The table is a record of Mahi Pono’s purchases of Restricted Use Pesticides [RUPs] from January through October 2020. RUP’s are not available to the public and must be applied by licensed professionals. The purchases were contained in data supplied by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture in response to a Uniform Information Practice Act [UIPA] request.
Mahi Pono has “moved completely away” from using Gramoxone, an herbicide containing the highly toxic chemical paraquat, and hasn’t applied it to any of its fields since June, the company told Politics on Maui Monday. In addition, the company said, it is “working to reduce its use of chemicals” in its farming operations.
What a gift to Maui from the island’s largest landowner! Indeed, a review of the company’s Restricted Use Pesticide [RUP] purchase records, provided by the state Department of Agriculture and outlined in the table above, shows a steep drop-off in all RUP purchases after June. Could Mahi Pono, which owns 41,000 acres of Central Maui ag land, finally be living up to its Hawaiian name, “to grow or cultivate properly”?
Well, call me Scrooge, but the announcement left me with questions that have piled up faster than presents around a Christmas tree.
On its face, it’s an exciting piece of news—one that I would expect to be shared widely with Maui media outlets. Why was it contained in an email sent only to my tiny news website?
Mahi Pono has faced strident criticism for its use of restricted chemicals ever since last January, when I first reported that the company was spraying paraquat-containing Gramoxone on its potato fields. It was an embarrassing development. Days before the story ran, then-company Senior Vice President of Operations Shan Tsutsui put out a frothy press release about the company’s decision not to spray Roundup (which is nasty, but not a Restricted Use Pesticide) under the headline “Mahi Pono Bringing Sustainable Ag to Maui.”
Paraquat, the active ingredient in Gramoxone and Cyclone SL 2.0 (also purchased by the company this year), is one of the most toxic chemicals in existence and one that has been banned internationally by many countries, including China, Brazil, the UK and every country in the European Union. It has also been linked to Parkinson’s disease. Paraquat is not a chemical that a company practicing “sustainable agriculture” would use.
Mahi Pono responded with a series of non-responses. It conspicuously avoided the “P” word, preferring the term “conventional farming,” agriculture-speak for chemical use. Although the initial news story never raised the issue of paraquat’s possible contamination of its potatoes, social media clamor provoked the company to send out samples for residue testing. The results (no residue found) weren’t provided to Mauitime, which first reported the paraquat use, but to the Maui News, which ran a front-page story. It also led to a public admonition from Maui County’s District Health Office Lorrin Pang, who said he was speaking as a private individual when advising Mahi Pono to “quit spraying stuff.”
Later, I reported the results of RUP spraying on various Mahi Pono fields that were contained in the Hawaii Pesticide Branch’s annual report of RUP chemical use. They indicated that wind speeds might have spread paraquat and another chemical toxic to bees and aquatic life much further than the targeted fields.
I bring all of this up because Mahi Pono’s use of paraquat and other toxic chemicals has been a big public headache for the company, a joint venture between a Canadian pension investment fund and a group of California agricultural real estate investors. That makes it all the more perplexing that such a momentous decision has been made so quietly. Why not shout it from the rooftops?
Large Paraquat Purchase
The company’s statement came in response to a question from Politics on Maui about the company’s purchase of a whopping 240 gallons of Gramoxone back in January, easily the largest of the 18 RUP purchases the company made between January and October. RUP’s are chemicals not available to the general public; they require application by a licensed professional. In Hawaii, all RUP sales must be reported to the state Department of Agriculture. To research this story, I requested and received a list of RUP sales throughout the state from January through October of this year.
The 240 gallons of Gramoxone was an amount so large—compared to the other purchases listed in the table above–that I wrote to Tsutsui on Sunday asking if there might have been a reporting error on the company’s part.
The email I got Monday from the company’s Honolulu-based PR firm didn’t dispute the amount purchased. Instead, it said that reports filed with the Department of Agriculture for November and December 2020 “will also reflect the return of more than half of the unused product.”
Curiously, as the table above reflects, Mahi Pono did purchase five gallons of Gramoxone on 3/26/20, then returned it on 4/28/20. Its 240-gallon Gramoxone purchase was made in January. Wouldn’t it have been returned by now?
It is harder to fact-check Mahi Pono’s assertion that it stopped spraying paraquat in June. Spraying reports for 2020 won’t be due at the Hawaii Department of Agriculture’s Pesticide Branch until January 30, 2021. Mahi Pono did not offer up any early results in its email.
But if the company did stop spraying paraquat in June, then why did it purchase another 2.5 gallons of Gramoxone on September 8? And what about its use of Cyclone SL 2.0, which also contains paraquat? Was that also stopped in June?
In its email, Mahi Pono also made a big deal out of the fact that it only applied Gramoxone to “non-food producing crops,” i.e., on weeds. Was that really the only way to control weeds?
No, says Jay Feldman, the executive director of the national nonprofit organization Beyond Pesticides. “The hazards associated with chemicals like paraquat, in particular, are really unconscionable given the availability and the cost effectiveness of organic production practices.”
Maybe Mahi Pono finally is moving to that more sustainable model. The email also said that the company has begun installing “weed mats in most of our fields.”
That the company has formally addressed this issue at all is truly cause for celebration. Perhaps Mahi Pono will see fit to share its news more widely to the Maui community in 2021.
