Today, 430 civil society and Indigenous peoples organisations from 69 countries around the world called on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to uphold human rights and end its partnership with CropLife International. CropLife is the industry association that represents the world’s largest pesticide manufacturers. Ahead of the [...]
The UK Government has today announced that it has approved an application by the British sugar beet industry and National Farmers Union (NFU) to use the bee-toxic insecticide, thiamethoxam, this growing season. The announcement mirrors a January 2020 decision from the UK Government. Last year, Defra made similar concessions to [...]
by Dr Alex Stuart, International Project Manager, PAN UK Due to the beautiful and complex interactions that occur between species, maintaining biodiversity underpins all life on earth. However, according to a recent UNEP report, the global rate of species extinction is now tens to hundreds of times higher than the [...]
by Keith Tyrell, Director, PAN UK Three decades ago, as a young graduate I embarked on a career in environmental and safety management. One of my first jobs was working on the safety systems of highly hazardous industries like oil and gas and chemical plants to ensure that the risk [...]
by Sarah Haynes, Collaboration Coordinator, hosted by PAN UK Over the last few months, PAN UK and RSPB have mobilised 45 organisations and individual farmers and academics to respond collectively to the UK Government’s public consultation on the revised UK National Action Plan for the Sustainable Use of Pesticides [...]
Rt Hon George Eustice, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 2 Marsham Street London SW1P 4DF 12th January 2021 Dear Secretary of State, We are extremely disappointed to hear that the UK Government has decided to grant an emergency derogation allowing sugar beet producers to use seeds [...]
by Steph Morren, Senior Policy Officer, RSPB In 2010, the world signed up to a set of 20 global targets, known as the Aichi targets, to halt the disastrous loss of biodiversity by 2020. Well, we’ve reached 2020 and sadly are still a very long way from halting biodiversity [...]
by Nick Mole, Policy Officer, PAN UK UPDATE (26th Oct 2020): FRANCE AND NEONICOTINOIDS There are mixed messages coming from France about the continued use of neonicotinoid insecticides. On the one hand the European Court of Justice ruled that France was entirely within its rights [...]
by Dave Goulson, Professor of Biology, University of Sussex The charity, Songbird Survival, are funding two PhD students in my lab at Sussex University, Priyesha Vijendra and Cannelle Tassin de Montaigu, to investigate whether pesticides are contributing to the ongoing declines of farmland birds. Impacts of pesticides on birds first [...]
Sustainable Cotton Ranking 2020 Published by PAN UK, Solidaridad and WWF, the Sustainable Cotton Ranking 2020 reveals significant progress by big brands toward more sustainable cotton. But also that the divide is growing between companies that take their responsibilities seriously and the many companies that do not. Adidas has surged ahead, [...]
by Josie Cohen, Head of Policy & Campaigns, PAN UK I joined PAN UK in June 2017 to help ensure that UK pesticide standards didn’t drop as a result of Brexit. There was a flurry of activity at the time and, over the next 18 months, we were kept [...]
But there's still a long way to go... By Hannah Conway, Assistant Campaigner, PAN UK In November 2019, we launched a campaign calling on UK supermarkets to do more to protect human health and the environment from pesticides used in their global supply chains. Our top recommendation to all supermarkets [...]
by Michel Pimbert, Professor of Agroecology and Food Politics at Coventry University Pesticide companies are caught up in a fierce competition for survival. In the current context of global mergers and restructurings, transnational corporations need to continuously increase their sales of synthetic pesticides in every possible corner of the [...]
by Nick Mole (Policy Officer, PAN UK) We are angry, the public are angry and the insects are dying Yet it appears that our politicians, across the board, are sitting on their hands as they have done for years hoping that this inconvenient truth will disappear and they can get [...]
It’s not the first time we’ve heard about declining insect numbers in recent years, but last week a global scientific study, the first of its kind, shocked even those working in the field to the core. The study – as outlined in an article published in The Guardian - found [...]
Supporting healthy, sustainable and productive smallholder vegetable farming: PAN Ethiopia and PAN UK’s new joint project in the Central Rift Valley Excessive use of Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) on vegetable crops grown for the Ethiopian market in the Lake Ziway area threatens the health of farmers and consumers. It also [...]
by Josie Cohen, Head of Policy & Campaigns (26th October, 2018) The Agriculture Bill currently going through parliament is the first chance the UK has had since 1947 to fundamentally reshape how we grow our food. It offers us the opportunity to usher in a new era of sustainable agriculture which better protects both human health and our natural environment. From PAN UK’s [...]
by Dr Stephanie Williamson, Staff Scientist, PAN UK (9th August 2018) Agroecological approaches to farming are receiving increasing attention, both at international policy level and in some countries’ national programmes. PAN UK’s Agroecology web section gives readers a brief description of agroecology. It also provides case studies in coffee, pineapples [...]
As the Better Cotton Initiative General Assembly opens, PAN UK publishes a revised version of its report on global pesticide use in cotton. The revised report includes new data on the United States Cotton sector’s pesticide use provided by Cotton Incorporated, and includes a reanalysis of official US government data. [...]
In 2015, the Center for International Environmental Law published a report ‘Lowest Common Denominator’ which examined how a proposed EU-US trade deal could weaken European standards of protection from toxic pesticides. The report analyses recommendations from pesticide industry lobby groups – CropLife America (CPA) and the European Crop Protection Association [...]
