The Food Justice organization has presented this week a report on the negative effects of pesticides both on human health and on the planet. The document Good Luck: Pesticides and Food demands that they disappear from the fields and that those that have been banned in the European Union stop being exported to vulnerable countries. These products, they insist, “do the only thing they know how to do: make sick and kill.”
Throughout fifteen pages, the dangers of the massive use of pesticides are listed, which have become the “cornerstone of the dominant agricultural systems”. The text focuses on products classified as prohibited, the most dangerous and toxic, which despite not being allowed in the European space, are used exceptionally under the protection of the law. “Only in 2019, the Spanish State gave its approval to 33 exception requests,” they say.
Another problem, according to Justicia Alimentaria, is how weak the control system for these substances is, especially in Spain, which analyzes fewer samples every year. Nor are their selection criteria clear. “Of the 50 most used pesticides, according to data from the Ministry of Agriculture, some of the most widely consumed products were not evaluated,” they criticize from this organization.
To this is added that in the last 10 years the use of pesticides has increased, “and they are increasingly combined and dangerous.” The fruits and vegetables with the most pesticides are strawberry, spinach, kale, pear, peach, nectarine, apple, grape, bell pepper, cherry, blueberry and green bean, they list.
The organization also criticizes the current authorization and establishment system of the Maximum Residue Limit (MRL), a partial measure that assesses the risk in food. They ensure that it is ineffective because when carrying out the risk assessments and assignment of the MRLs, “the life cycle of the pesticide is not taken into account, nor is it its long-term and cumulative effects, nor the endocrine disruption activity”. The combined or cocktail effect that occurs when different toxic active substances act at the same time, they add, is another aspect that is not valued.
The document is launched at a time when the legislative proposal that proposed reducing the use of pesticides by 50%, and repairing 20% ??of the damaged ecosystems has been attacked by the conservatives of the European Parliament and the agrochemical lobbies. The activists insist that these behaviors can cause the regulation to never see the light of day and that the strategies From Farm to Fork and Biodiversity of the European Green Pact “remain on a dead letter.”
The Good Luck: Pesticides and Food report also denounces the export of banned pesticides to states that do not have the capacity to properly test them. Along these lines, Spain is the sixth EU exporter of these substances. In European territory it is illegal to use them (“due to their very high human and environmental toxicity”), but they can be produced, which allows EU companies to continue manufacturing them and exporting them to third countries such as Brazil, Morocco, Mexico, Malaysia or Chile.
When this happens, not only is the toxicity externalized to the most vulnerable people: according to Food Justice, a boomerang effect is also produced. “First, because the environment is global and the effects of pesticides on the ecosystems of a country affect ours, and second, because these exported pesticides return home,” they point out. In this way, if Spain exports toxic pesticides to Morocco, the African country could send them back to the peninsula through fruit and vegetables. However, one can only speculate, they say from the organization, because the world of pesticides is not transparent enough nor is there too much data.
Although at first glance it may seem difficult to achieve, Food Justice calls for these substances to stop being used, or at least the most toxic ones. They defend that countries must begin to invest in other solutions and that, in the case of Spain, a National Action Plan should be drawn up that contains the reduction objectives, schedule and specific measures to reduce synthetic pesticides. They also propose to introduce a tax on pesticides, improve transparency and public access to information on pesticides, and ban the export of unauthorized pesticides, thus complying with the Rotterdam Convention.
