State Departments of Agriculture

Federal and state regulatory programs that govern pesticide use, storage, and disposal have been asked to deal with increasingly complex and technical issues in the past decade. The public's understanding of these programs forms the basis for either a positive or negative perception of the regulator and the regulated community. Public perception and opinion does have a major effect on these existing pesticide programs. As an example, the involvement among regulatory agencies, government, pesticide industries, and the public in Louisiana is depicted in fig. 1. A pesticide program that does not relate to the concerns of the public often is required to refocus its policy to reflect these local or national issues (i.e., pesticide residues in food and groundwater contamination).