Recent enactment of Kauai Bill 2491 and the Hawaii County Council’s passage of Bill 113 have set off a clamor for the state Legislature to strip the counties of authority to protect people and the environment from irresponsible agricultural practices.

This campaign originates with the chemical/biotech companies and the largest agribusiness interests, alarmed by these efforts to provide some protection the state has refused to give its citizens.

The rumor that the state already has sole power to regulate anything agricultural is false, despite contrary legal-sounding asser- tions. HRS S46-1.5(13) gives the counties the power to protect health, life and property "on any subject or matter" not conflicting with state law. And regardless of any state law, counties can restrict "noise, smoke, dust, vibration, or odors" (HRS S 46-17). Each county is different and has the authority to respond to different needs, even if that may inconvenience some multinational corporations.

Arguments about which level of government should control, while couched in terms of general policy, somehow always reflect the self-interest of the people making them. The same person denouncing the federal government for ignoring states’ rights will defend federal regulations they like. When a county takes action, those with contrary preferences suddenly insist the state must take control — until the state passes a law they do not care for.

Counties across the country have been exercising some control over agricultural practices for many, many years, and efforts to strip them of that power are nothing new. Campaigns for sole state control of pesticides always come from the chemical/biotech companies and those, like the Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation, in thrall to them. When the U.S. Supreme Court held 22 years ago that federal pesticide law does not preclude the counties from restricting spraying, the chemical companies lobbied states to do so.

And some did — but Hawaii did not. Had it done so, the people of Kauai who live with pesticides drifting into their schools and yards from the GMO growers’ fields that surround them would still be shouting for help from the state — which would still be ignoring them, as it has, shamefully, for years. People with sick children breathing toxic chemicals can get pretty tired of being told by industry lobbyists and government bureaucrats that they have insufficient respect for science.

The argument for state preemption of local control is always the same: We need "uniformity." But this never seems to mean laws that uniformly protect people and the environment, only laws that uniformly do not. This latest preemption panic has been set off by Kauai Bill 2491, which mandates modest, common-sense pesticide disclosure and buffer zones around schools and rivers, and Hawaii County Bill 113’s effort to avoid having the county overrun by biotech crops, which in other places have contaminated conventional crops and made them unmarketable, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

Had the state done its part to protect Kauai’s people, or show any spine in the face of biotech bullying and relentless expansion, perhaps the grassroots would not have had to turn to county government for relief. The proper response is not to strip the counties of ability to help, or to offer insulting "voluntary agreements" from an industry seeking to prevent laws that would hold them accountable. It is for the state to step up and protect the people and the aina.