(Excerpt from Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific (PANAP) Executive Director Sarojeni V. Rengam’s Intervention at the 6th United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, 26 February-1 March 2024)
Each year, millions of farmers and farmworkers are acutely poisoned by pesticides with150,000 pesticide-related suicides and most of these happen in the Global South where most farmers are unaware of the impacts of pesticides on their health and the environment. An unknown number of long-term effects including cancer and numerous chronic illnesses also result from pesticides. These are not only figures, but women, men, and children whose lives have been unjustly harmed by Highly Hazardous Pesticides. Women farmers and workers are adversely affected by pesticides and their exposure and the health impacts remain invisible.
As a Regional facilitator for Asia Pacific, we believe that safer alternatives already exist, including highly effective agroecological approaches and thousands of farmers are already practicising agroecology. And many HHPs have been successfully phased out from agriculture without affecting agricultural productivity.
We therefore support this resolution which we feel is necessary to advance more stronger national and multilateral actions on highly hazardous pesticides. We would also urge actions to stop double standards – the trade in banned pesticides in one region or country exported to another. Finally, it would be important that support both financial and technical for agroecology is made available as well as for farmers and rural people transitioning to agroecology including markets for local agroecological production.
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