Ecology

Experts have been warning for years that biodiversity is at stake. Pesticides have been identified as one of the causes for why the abundance of animals and plant species is deteriorating so quickly and disastrously.

Pesticide use leads to residues in food to which many people are exposed – especially in the Global South. But as an import, contaminated food can also end up on European plates.

Insufficient attention is being paid to pesticides accumulating in the soil, where they exert direct and indirect adverse effects on soil life – sometimes for decades.

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.