Pesticides are hazardous to human health and the environment, undermine local and global food security and threaten agricultural biodiversity.
Yet these pervasive chemicals are aggressively promoted by multinational corporations, government agencies, and other players in this more than $35 billion a year industry.
PANNA (Pesticide Action Network North America) works to replace pesticide use with ecologically sound and socially just alternatives. As one of five autonomous PAN Regional Centers worldwide, we link local and international consumer, labor, health, environment and agriculture groups into an international citizens' action network. This network challenges the global proliferation of pesticides, defends basic rights to health and environmental quality, and works to ensure the transition to a just and viable society.
Regional Centers
PANNA works closely with and is a founding member of Californians for Pesticide Reform (CPR).
PAN North America: The First 25 Years
in 1982, the luster of the “Green Revolution” had faded to a dull finish. The promised dramatic increases in yields from “miracle” hybrid grains that required high inputs of water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides had been revealed to be campaigns to sell technology to people who couldn’t afford it. The green was going into the pockets of the corporations pushing the technology.
That was the world when PAN was founded.
Chemical-intensive, hybridized, mono-crop irrigated agriculture, introduced in the Global South in the 1950s, boosted crop yields at first, but by the ’70s, the costs in health, ecological damage, and lost biodiversity were mounting—and pests were growing resistant to pesticides. Meanwhile, trans-national corporations and local elites profited at the expense of local communities who were losing control over food production. Women and children shouldered most of the fieldwork—and bore the brunt of the pesticide exposure.
In the years since PAN was founded, the Green Revolution has been reassessed and new approaches have been added. When rice production was collapsing in the 1980s due to pest resurgence from resistance to pesticides, Indonesia needed alternatives. A combination of community-scale peer-learning projects recaptured indigenous farming knowledge woven together with new ecological pest management. “Farmer Field Schools”—today adapted to local needs in many countries—returned bountiful crops of rice while expenditures on agrichemicals were slashed. Meanwhile, Indonesia and other countries began banning PAN’s “Dirty Dozen Pesticides.” By 2002, more than a million Indonesian farmers had participated in Field Schools that became models for localized sustainable agriculture in other countries.
But the companies that profited from the Green Revolution—today consolidated into six mega-corporations—have opened a second front in their ongoing effort to control the world’s food supply. The “Gene Revolution” is designed to make farmers dependent on patented seeds “owned” by the corporations. Many of these biotech seeds are genetically engineered to withstand heavier applications of proprietary herbicides produced by the same transnationals. The goal is to colonize Nature while perpetuating the pesticide treadmill.
On March 28, PAN Asia/Pacific and South Korean partner groups convened a seminar in Seoul on “How to Secure the Safety of Rice”—one of many events in the first “Week of Rice Action” across 13 countries. Addressing the conference, Vice-Minister of Agriculture Park Hae Sang declared his government’s intent “to prevent importing GMO rice.”
PAN North America links these struggles in the Global South with similar battles in our own region. On Native lands, inside urban canyons and across the face of rural America, our scientists and partners are testing the air for pesticide drift. We’re joining neighbors from Canada to Mexico in resisting further imposition of genetically engineered crops. And we’re helping create a domestic Fair Trade movement to support family farms and guarantee living wages and safer conditions for farmworkers. Our commitment is to a truly green revolution, one that includes not only a sustainable agriculture, but most important, expansion of human rights to food, justice and self-determination.
Breaking the Circle of Poison
PAN is not a mainstream environmental organization. We were intentionally founded in the Global South, where millions are being hurt by the onslaught of chemically dependent farming. From the get-go, we put scientists together with grassroots environmental justice movements to promote health and equity.
In 2007, Pesticide Action Network is celebrating 25 years of progress toward reducing and eliminating the use of pesticides that damage public health and poison the air, soil, water, domestic animals and wildlife everywhere on our beleaguered planet. We’ve been effective because PAN honors and amplifies the voices of the people most directly harmed by these chemicals. We link the interests of farmers, farmworkers and rural communities with residents in small towns and large cities—all of whom are at risk from exposure to pesticides.
PAN has
grown from “a good idea that might work” (as one of the participants in
the founding meeting put it) to an effective force for positive global
transformation. From our beginning, PAN and PAN North America (PANNA)
have functioned as network-based platforms that leverage the efforts
and resources of diverse allies on six continents.
PANNA serves as
one of five autonomous, regional networks around the world that
collectively form PAN International. PAN’s other regional centers are
located in Germany, Malaysia and Senegal. In Latin America,
coordination is currently shared between groups in Chile and Colombia.
With a growing toolkit of skills, expertise, strategies and collaborative approaches, PAN’s ever-expanding circle of participants and allies has won critical policy changes and reined in dangerous practices by building strong partnerships and working simultaneously on local, regional, national and global fronts. Our joint international campaigns have helped to create new standards, codes and treaties for global solutions.
Prior Informed Consent
PAN was an early manifestation of what some now call the “globalization from below” movement. The 1982 founding meeting in Penang, Malaysia, focused on resisting the corporate globalization of the pesticide trade. It was at this historic meeting that participants devised the concept of “Prior Informed Consent.” PIC would establish a new standard for export and import of hazardous chemicals. Manufacturers had been dumping pesticides in the Global South, regardless of actual need or consequences. The voluntary PIC standard was designed to give importing nations access to information on the regulatory status of highly toxic pesticides and, more importantly, it would give them the right to refuse to accept such imports.
Over the next three years, PAN partners in many countries collaborated in gathering evidence underscoring the need for Prior Informed Consent and presented their findings to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). We lobbied the agency to incorporate PIC within the new International Pesticide Code of Conduct FAO adopted in 1985. When the U.S. and European pesticide manufacturing countries blocked this, PAN -persisted in monitoring the problem and increased its lobbying efforts to strengthen the FAO Code. PAN used the Code as a vehicle for highly leveraged organizing, as well as to build public support around the need for global pesticide reform.
In 1987, the FAO finally adopted PIC within the Code. After a decade of work by PAN and PANNA to help create a formal treaty, Prior Informed Consent became international law with the signing of the Rotterdam Convention (PIC treaty) in 1998. The PIC treaty took full effect in 2004 and has been ratified by 117 countries to date.
Banning the Dirty Dozen
In 1985, PAN launched the International Dirty Dozen Pesticides Campaign to win a global ban on the production and use of 12 classes of pesticides that were identified as being particularly damaging in the Global South. In the late 1980s, PANNA and our partners forced Ciba-Geigy to stop making chlordimeform, a carcinogenic Dirty Dozen pesticide. By 1995, the campaign had helped win a thousand-fold increase in bans and restrictions on these target pesticides in countries around the world.
Over time, the Dirty Dozen campaign contributed to the creation of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs treaty). The POPs treaty requires full global phaseouts of 12 chemicals, seven of which are PAN Dirty Dozen pesticides, including the infamous DDT. The treaty went into force on May 17, 2004 and, to date, has been ratified by 147 countries. Due to continued pressure by PAN and our allies, the parties to the treaty (countries that have ratified it) will soon add an eighth Dirty Dozen pesticide, lindane, to the treaty’s global phaseout list.
PANNA constantly works to expose the concentrated power of corporate chemical, agricultural, and biotech companies, the complicity of governments, and the scale of damages and threats associated with promotion of these dangerous substances and technologies.
Monitoring the World Bank
In the late 1980s, in partnership with PAN Asia and the Pacific, PAN North America began to monitor the pest management practices of the World Bank. What we discovered resulted in a 1996–2002 PANNA-led campaign that forced the Bank to adopt policies promoting least-toxic Integrated Pest Management. NGOs and community groups in China, Indonesia and Mexico were trained by PANNA to monitor and successfully demand changes in agricultural development projects in all three countries. In turn, our credibility in on-the-ground work earned PANNA and several civil society partners a pivotal role in the UN’s International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development. This contentious, four-year process is set to be completed in early 2008.
Acting Globally and Locally
Today, PANNA continues to work in close collaboration with PAN partners around the world to promote food sovereignty and alternatives to pesticides. Our focus remains banning and eliminating the production and use of the worst pesticides, while advancing regulations that are based on the Precautionary Principle, on locally controlled, ecologically-based food systems, and on democratic decision-making.
Since the late 1990s, we have also invested more resources in strengthening North American network power to document problems and force turnarounds in local, state and national policies and practices. For example, we have been building alliances with rural communities in California, Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Oregon, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina and Washington; as well as forming strong, collaborative relationships with partners in Canada and Mexico. Many of these regional groups are using PANNA’s Pesticide Drift Catcher, the air-monitoring instrument that allows concerned citizens to document scientifically the presence of pesticides in the air they breathe.
We are pleased to report that, despite the Bush Administration’s determination to turn back the clock, we are seeing major progress in parts of the U.S. where we have programs and partners. On the immediate horizon, PAN North America is gathering strength to:
- Challenge the vociferous and misguided promotion of DDT to control malaria by working with both Artic-dwelling Indigenous Americans and Africans,
- Convince the U.S. Senate to ratify the POPs treaty,
- Eliminate the pharmaceutical use of lindane (a neurotoxin that is considered too dangerous for use on pets but is still prescribed for children with head lice),
- Eliminate chlorpyrifos and other acutely hazardous organophosphate pesticides, and
- Promote alternatives to dangerous fumigant pesticides.
Over the past 25 years, PANNA has worked hard to develop the expertise, wisdom and power needed to expose powerful corporate interests whose goal is to control the global food system—to hold them accountable and reduce pesticide harm. We will continue to connect the needs, strengths and dreams of people everywhere who are committed to creating socially just, sustainable healthy food systems and a toxic-free future.
Our commitment has never been stronger. We celebrate our strong and skilled new leadership in PAN North America, our growing base of individual members, and our partners and allies around the world who, together, will build on these achievements.