Articles

385 million people fall ill every year from pesticide poisoning. The United Nations intend to improve the worldwide handling of pesticides to prevent harm, but there is little effective legal regulation.

Before they are put on the market, pesticides go through an approval process in which their impacts on human health and the environment are tested. But their indirect effects on food chains and biodiversity receive little attention, neither do the effects of pesticide mixtures that are hard to predict.

The European Union is one of the world’s biggest markets for pesticides. Policies to reduce their use have not been very successful so far. The lack of standardized data makes monitoring and comparing countries difficult.

The global pesticide market is growing – and there are only a few corporations that are dividing it up among themselves. They are increasingly investing in countries in the Global South, where pesticides are less strictly regulated.

Parts of global crop production are lost to pests and plant pathogens each year. Pesticides have been designed to prevent these yield losses – but they also give rise to new problems.

More and more highly toxic pesticides are being used in agriculture worldwide, although the consequences for our ecosystem are serious.

The EU is the largest pesticide export market in the world, now investing more and more in countries of the Global South, where EU companies are allowed to export pesticides banned on their own due to their harmful effects on human health and the environment. A longstanding demand of international civil society calls for laws that effectively ban these toxic exports.

The situation in the energy sector has led to national strategies that often conflict with the policies of neighbours and allies, and at the same time to a significant move away from clean energy sources. In other words, we have a "dirty nationalism", writes Martin Keim.

The EuroPride 2022 fiasco shows us one thing: Serbia will not become part of the EU under President Aleksandar Vučić. The EU must face the cultural war in the Western Balkans head on, tackle disinformation and take Serbia’s EU accession seriously.

On 25 September 2022 Italy goes to the polls in an election that is characterized by many “first times.” It is the first time ever that the country votes just after the summer. Moreover, Italy is, for the first time, the country receiving most of the EU’s Next Generation EU budget (around 191 billion euros granted by common bonds). The “how to spend it” is of concern not only to the Italians and Brussels, but to the EU as a whole.