Pesticide giants making billions from highly toxic chemicals
The world’s biggest pesticide firms are making billions of dollars every year from highly hazardous chemicals that are harmful for human health or the environment, according to an analysis by campaigners.
According to research from Unearthed, the world’s five biggest pesticide manufacturers are making more than a third of their income from leading products selling these toxic chemicals.
The investigation identified billions of dollars of income for agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta from chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure.
The most valuable markets for the highly hazardous pesticides were soya and corn, grown in large part to provide animal feed for the meat industry.
The database, obtained from leading agribusiness intelligence firm Phillips McDougall, covers $23.3bn in pesticide sales across 43 different countries.
The findings also revealed that there is a higher proportion of highly hazardous pesticides sales in poorer nations than in rich ones. In India, 59% of sales were of HHPs in contrast to just 11% in the UK, according to the analysis.
Unearthed and Public Eye, an NGO that investigates human rights abuses by Swiss companies, combed this dataset for sales of chemicals on the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) International list of highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs).
The investigation found that close to half (41%) of the leading products of the agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta contained at least one HHP.
Meriel Watts, a senior science and policy advisor to PAN, told Unearthed: “This investigation shows that there is a huge disconnect between what those companies are saying in the international policy arena and what they are actually doing.”
Baskut Tuncak, UN special rapporteur on hazardous substances and human rights, said: “It is inappropriate for companies to earn such significant income from HHPs in this day and age. The continued use of these products is unsustainable and is causing a multitude of human rights violations around the world.”
Bayer along with a few other companies disputes PAN’s list due to disagreements with the conclusions of other bodies, such as the European Chemical Agency. Some bodies deem certain chemicals as highly hazardous pesticides and others don’t.
A spokesman for Bayer also said the differing sales from nation to nation reflected the different needs of farmers: “Agriculture is very different from region to region due to different climates, pests, diseases and crops. In Brazil, for example, farmers must manage pests such as Asian Soybean Rust or insect pressure which don’t exist in Europe.”