WASHINGTON— Fifty years after Congress passed the current Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act to protect people and the environment, the law has instead fast-tracked approval of dangerous pesticides banned across much of the world.

By allowing pesticide assessments to rely largely on the industry’s confidential reviews of its own products, the law has sanctioned harm to frontline farmworkers, fenceline communities and wildlife, according to independent research highlighted in a new 10-point assessment by the Center for Biological Diversity.

“For 50 years FIFRA’s glaring failures have allowed dangerous levels of harm to U.S. farmworkers, public health and our most-endangered wildlife,” said J.W. Glass, EPA policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ve got to end the pesticide industry’s chokehold on the regulation of its own products and create a process that actually protects the health of people and the environment.”

Although FIFRA was first passed in 1947, it is the amended version of the law approved by Congress 50 years ago this week that has led to the annual U.S. use of more than 1 billion pounds of pesticides — nearly a fifth of worldwide use.

The Center’s assessment spotlights how the law’s failure to require that pesticide safety reviews incorporate peer-reviewed, independent research has greenlighted the use of 85 pesticides banned in many other leading agricultural countries. These products are now used across hundreds of millions of U.S. acres, accounting for more a quarter of all U.S. agricultural use of pesticides, according to the Center’s review.

The review’s findings of harm under FIFRA include:

n Failure to protect farmworkers: More than 20,000 farmworkers are poisoned by pesticides each year — a rate of illness and injury that is 37 times higher than nonagricultural workers.

n Failure to protect endangered species: 100% of protected amphibians are likely be harmed by three neonicotinoid insecticides approved under FIFRA. Researchers have also found these pesticides are playing an outsized role in pushing pollinators like bumblebees and monarch butterflies closer to extinction.

n Failure to alert public to evidence of harm: Even after 2,500 pet deaths and more than 100,000 reports of harm have been linked to Seresto flea and tick collars the EPA has refused to alert the public to the risks because FIFRA doesn’t require it.

In an effort to overhaul FIFRA, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has proposed the Protect America’s Children from Toxic Pesticides Act. The bill would ban some of the most damaging pesticides known to cause significant harm, including organophosphates, neonicotinoids and paraquat.

By requiring mandatory reporting of pesticide poisonings, it would also provide stronger protections for frontline and farmworker communities that disproportionately bear the burden of pesticide exposure. The bill would close the loopholes that allow for abuse of emergency pesticide exemptions, and it would allow citizens to work with the EPA to quickly get dangerous products off the market in the face of emerging knowledge of a pesticide’s harm.

“Independent research leaves no question about how badly FIFRA has failed to protect us even from some of the world’s most dangerous poisons,” said Glass. “For the sake of the frontline communities and animals that are harmed day after day, lawmakers should make these commonsense changes to update the nation’s most ineffective environmental law.”