A petition of 187,300 signatures by civil society and indigenous people’s organisations was delivered to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director-General Qu Dongyu in Rome this morning.
Facilitated by Pesticide Action Network (PAN), Friends of the Earth, SumOfUs, and the Centre for International Environmental Law (CIEL), the global petition demands that the FAO end its partnership, formed over a year ago, with CropLife International, an association representing the world’s largest agrochemical companies (read more about the partnership here).
Despite letters of appeal from more than 350 civil society organisations and 250 scientists urging the FAO Director-General to stop this toxic alliance, the UN agency charged with reducing hunger and supporting farmers and rural communities around the world continues to formally align with an industry that is devastating people and the planet. After the partnership was announced, a coalition of 11 global organisations, including PAN, sent a formal request to meet with Director-General Qu to discuss their concerns, but no response has been received to date.
Recent estimates show that there are 385 million cases of acute unintentional pesticide poisonings each year. This means that 44% of farmers and agricultural workers around the world are poisoned each year. CropLife members are the largest agrichemical companies in the world and include BASF, Bayer Crop Science, Corteva Agriscience, FMC and Syngenta. They make more than one-third of their sales income from Highly Hazardous Pesticides — the pesticides that are most harmful to human health and the environment. Their primary aim is to maximize sales of their products, regardless of health and environmental harms.
“This partnership would turn the FAO into a marketing arm for these toxic companies whose products poison millions of farmers every year.”
Keith Tyrell, Director, PAN UK
“The partnership between the FAO and CropLife will undermine all efforts made in Africa to ban dangerous pesticides, and will leave the door open to the export of pesticides banned in Europe such as atrazine, paraquat etc. We denounce and strongly reject this ‘Toxic Alliance’ as it is beset with conflict of interests not known to the public, to the detriment of health protection and environmental preservation.”
Maimouna Diene, coordinator of PAN Africa
“We cannot expect that partnering with an association of hundreds of subsidiaries to multinational giants like Bayer and Syngenta – who have vested interests in increasing the sales of their products – will support FAO’s own goals of reducing reliance on pesticides. It is incompatible with FAO’s mandate as a UN institution to protect human rights, including the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, which the UN Human Rights Council just recently recognized.”
Simone Adler, Organizing Co-Director of PAN North America
Today, on World No Pesticides Day, we commemorate the anniversary of the Bhopal tragedy and call on the United Nations to end their alliance with the pesticide industry.
