California Governor Gavin Newsome announced California will ban the use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos. The California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) said it could take up to two years to complete the process of cancelling products containing chlorpyrifos.

The decision comes after regulators in several states have taken steps to restrict the pesticide use on about 60 different crops. The New York legislature sent a bill prohibiting the pesticide to the governor last week. Hawaii banned the product in 2018. In addition, legislation has been introduced in Oregon, New Jersey, and Connecticut to ban chlorpyrifos.

Chlorpyrifos was first registered as an insecticide in 1965. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it is the “most used conventional insecticide” in the U.S. with roughly 6 million pounds used on around 10 million acres between 2009 and 2013.

In 2016, then-President Barack Obama’s EPA announced plans to ban chlorpyrifos but was reversed by the Trump administration.

In August 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered EPA to ban the use of chlorpyrifos.

In response, SAF joined several other organizations in requesting that the decision be reconsidered and noted “Growers face limited or no viable alternatives to chlorpyrifos when an outbreak of a new pest occurs and have relied on chlorpyrifos as a proven first-line of defense.”

Subsequently, the court reversed the ban.