Committees of the state House and Senate have wisely deferred or amended a passel of lousy bills that pretend to be public-policy approaches to pesticide abuse, but are really just propaganda instruments for a "movement" that behaves as though strident rhetoric must always trump logic and intelligent decisions.

In so doing, these committees have recognized that many people throughout Hawaii are concerned about pesticide abuse, but that a loud, extreme activist wing has whipped up this concern and tried to shape it into raging hysteria.

The bills would have imposed complicated and arguably unnecessary new requirements on large farming operations — exclusively those run by GMO (genetically modified organism) seed companies.

And that’s what this is really about — not pesticides. It’s about finding an indirect route to attack GMO agriculture, even though genetic modification of corn, for example, has been routine since the 1920s. It’s a controversy about a radical political objective of barring GMOs — even those cleared for the market under strict federal standards — for no valid scientific reason.

Four of the bills explicitly permit each Hawaii county to set up its own pesticide regulatory scheme, even though none of the counties is in any position to actually take on this responsibility and the state of Hawaii is the authorized agent of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency when it comes to pesticide enforcement. The result would be a crazy quilt of potentially contradictory standards that would make all farmers’ operations even more difficult than they are now.

The Kauai County Council wisely saw through the attack on GMOs when it passed the ill-conceived Bill 2491 last year. Even though portions of the bill that clamped new restrictions on pesticides were enacted (later to be invalidated by a federal judge on grounds the standards were in conflict with legal authority vested in the state alone), the council deleted virtually every provision relating to GMOs. Kauai also created a joint fact-finding process in which a community council will sort fact from fiction in the GMO debate.

This controversy is mostly about hysteria and power. Unfortunately, bothersome factual information is overlooked. Consider just three examples:

» There is no scientific basis for establishing a 500-foot "buffer zone" around fields where pesticides are applied, even when accepted federal standards don’t require such separation.

As one Oahu farmer testified, his operations have 13 miles of irrigation ditch. Removing land to create these arbitrary buffer zones would take 100 acres out of food production for each mile of irrigation ditch.

» While advocates of the pesticide bills have contended that GMO companies’ seed operations have contaminated schools with pesticides, a neutral statewide survey found that, of 16 school closures due to pesticide concerns since 2006, 10 were caused by homeowner pesticide misuse and not one by seed company operations. Ironically, the National Tropical Botanical Garden was responsible for one incident.

» Backers have specifically focused on a birth defect called gastroschisis, a rare condition in which a baby’s intestines are outside the body at birth. Propagandists insist that pesticides have caused several Hawaii cases, but the overwhelming weight of legitimate scientific research says otherwise.

The extremists instead pin their argument on one sentence in just one study that acknowledged that the causes of gastroschisis are unknown, so perhaps researchers should study a possible relationship with pesticides.

For their trouble, the chairs and members of the committees that have acted responsibly by refusing to be stampeded have found themselves vilified. But they are the good guys (and women), not the dark side in this sorry episode in Hawaii legislative history.

Allan Parachini is a Kauai resident. He was a medical journalist for the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Sun-Times.