A Greenpeace investigation finds that more than 81,600 tonnes of banned agricultural chemicals in Europe were shipped to developing countries in 2018.
A new Greenpeace investigation, based on an analysis of 400 European company reports, concludes that Europe sold more than 81,600 tonnes of banned pesticides in 2018 – including dichloropropene, cyanamide, paraquat, trifluralin, acetochlor and atrazine herbicide – to 85 countries, of three out of four are developing countries. The United Kingdom is at the top of the list with 82% of these exports.
The European Union has decided to ban these pesticides because they have damaging effects on the ecosystem, such as water pollution, altering populations of pollinating insects, birds and fish. In addition, they can increase the risk of diseases such as Parkinson’s or cancer and affect the human endocrine and reproductive systems, something that the United Nations has been warning for three years, denouncing serious abuses by the industry that produces these products.
“The fact that a product is banned in Europe does not mean that it is illegal in Africa,” says Diego Ayala, an entomologist at the Institute for Research for Development (IRD) in Marseille (France), to the Spanish newspaper El Pais.
