theguardian.com Almost half of world’s farmers poisoned by pesticides every year, experts find Pippa Neill 4–5 minutes
Almost half of the world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every single year, a study has found.
Using publicly available data from 2006-2023, the study, which was commissioned by Pesticide Action Network, found there to be an estimated 402-433m cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning of farmers and farm workers every year.
Based on a worldwide farming population of 934 million, this means approximately 46% of farmers are being poisoned every year. The greatest estimated number of poisonings was in southern Asia, followed by south-east Asia and east Africa.
The overall highest national incidence of poisoning was in Burkina Faso in west Africa, where nearly 84% of farmers and farm workers were reported to have experienced poisoning. Farm workers harvest cotton in Burkino Faso Young farm workers harvesting cotton in a field near Boromo in Burkina Faso. Photograph: Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health on Wednesday, also found that an estimated 11,000 deaths occur every year due to pesticide poisoning, with nearly 60% of these in India.
Jayakumar Chelaton, the executive director of Pesticide Action Network India, said the research exposed a “crisis that can no longer be ignored”.
The authors of the study are calling for “immediate action”, including the implementation of a UN recommendation to phase out highly hazardous pesticides.
The study states that despite global efforts to highlight the dangers, pesticide use has continued to grow steadily, with 3.8m tonnes used in 2023, a doubling since 1990.
Dr Sheila Willis, the head of international programmes at Pesticide Action Network UK, said: “Now that the scale of suffering has been revealed, farmers must be supported to access safer alternatives to protect their health and that of their families.”
The study did not consider the impact of pesticide exposure on the estimated 84 million children working in agriculture and did not look at the long-term health impacts, with acute pesticide poisoning defined in the study as any illness or health effect experienced a short time after exposure. skip past newsletter promotion
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Génon Jensen, the executive director of the Health and Environment Alliance, said: “We are extremely concerned about the devastating health impacts from pesticide poisonings – both the acute impacts mentioned in this study but also chronic exposures that farm workers and communities suffer.”
Hélène Nicora, the director general of Parkinson’s Europe, said there was also “overwhelming evidence” to suggest that Parkinson’s was an environmentally driven disease, with growing evidence linking pesticide exposure to the development of Parkinson’s.
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive disorder in which parts of the brain become damaged over time, affecting movement and balance. The global burden of the disease is rising, with France, Germany and Italy all recognising it as an occupational disease for farmers.
Farmers and farm workers are mainly exposed to pesticides during preparation and application, as well as when touching treated crops and contaminated equipment or clothing.
Speaking at a webinar organised by Friends of the Earth Europe earlier this year, Rendert Algra said he believed his Parkinson’s disease was linked to the pesticides he had used when working at his family farm in the Netherlands.
“Being the eldest son, I did all the spraying of pesticides in our fields for several years in a row,” he said.
Despite being the most robust study to date, the report highlights that available information on pesticide poisoning is inadequate, with the authors calling for standardised surveillance and reporting protocols so that pesticide-related poisonings become reliable and comparable.
5 Comments
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 4d
Almost half? I'd be amazed if even 10% are handling pesticides properly. Granted, my personal sample size is kinda low, but I do workplace safety and hazardous materials handling, so I occasionally visit a farm for an audit on whatever certifications they have around that topic.
I have seen ZERO farms where they were properly handling dangerous chemicals, and that's during an audit apointment (so lets not even mention what they're doing when they haven't been informed in advance). And we're not talking "You should have rolled the glove off instead of pulling" we're talking "you shouldn't lean your upper body into an IBC tank to stir the chemicals with your whole arm".
All industrial chemicals come with safety guidelines and handling instructions. NOBODY follows those. Dutch and German farmers will gladly spray chemicals, turn into the mist at the edge of the field and complain how wet their coverals got, while wearing them for the rest of the day. It's not like the safety instructions are rocket science, and it's not a new thing. These instructions and warning have existed for near half a century.
So yeah, 50% is FAR too low.
Ok, this is going to sound like victim blaming, but he is the perfect illustration of this problem.
He has this "hilarious" story about how he would sit on the back on a tractor, and spray the fields and get covered in whatever they were spraying (like we all did, right? ha. ha.). He then goes on to blame the people who made the chemicals, who specifically told him not to do the exact thing he did. It's like me blaming the DYI store for my broken legs, because I fell off the ladder while doing a handstand on it.
I guarantee you nobody is going to report on poisoning themselves with their own chemicals during the job they do for themselves. Self-employed people are the absolute worst for following safety rules and regulations.
ooli3@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 4d
Do you have an opinion about bio pesticide, the natural stuff used as pesticide to grant the "bio" label? are those less dangerous? Or , as you said, less restrictive for a correct usage?
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 3d
Short answer:
There is nothing inherently more or less safe when using molecules that occur in nature compared to those that don't, so its a useless distinction invented for marketing purposes. Also, it's really hard tell, because everything is actually REALLY safe these days.
MUCH longer answer:
First, nature doesn't really care if you got the stuff from grinding up flowers, or synthesising the chemicals in a reactor. "Biological" doesn't really mean anything, so you can't strictly call the entire group less dangerous or more dangerous. Rotenone, for example, is technically organic because it comes from a plant, but pretty much none of the rotenone sold is actually made that way, and the chemical is the same anyway.
Second, it's also REALLY hard to tell the different levels of danger these days, because most of the really dangerous pesticides have already been banned, if not worldwide then at least in the West. They were really easy to identify: if you take some (organic-certified) arsenic, you're going to die, right there, on the spot. Same for (non-organic) DDT. So, we banned those, problem solved.
That eliminates most of the really dangerous stuff. What we're really doing in the West is now finding risks in the margins, and that's hard. That's why there's such a huge discussion about glyphosate, and it's honestly pretty hard to tell (despite what public opinion might tell you). The dangers of Round-up are that it could increase the risk of Parkinsons disease by several percent in a percentage of people who use it for decades, while not following instructions. There is no ethical way to test for this, and any population survey will inherently self-select out any useful data, so it's unlikely we'll ever have any real data.
There's also a third problem: The waters are being intentionally muddied, both socially and with actually neferarious purposes on all sides.
On top of that, it's also very socially not-done to blame the victim when it's a professional cause, but quickly done when it's private. If some farmer got sick because he was mixing chemicals by dunking his arms in the vat, we say it's a dangerous chemical. Yet, if my neighbor drinks a cup of dishwashing detergent and ends up in the hospital, nobody is going to campaign for banning Tide.
There are also MASSIVE sums of money involved, both for the companies selling the stuff, and for the individuals suing those companies, and for the companies selling alternatives. Lobbyists are getting massive sums of money, and media is running "woe is me" stories. It's nearly impossible to tell what is actually true, and because of the second problem, we don't even have great data to look at either.
So it's probably impossible to tell, but if there is a difference, it's definitely not categorical.
Tl;DR: "Organic" pesticides are not inherently better. One substance might be less dangerous than another, but the differences are tiny these days.
DISCLAIMER: This is a very western view. I'm sure there are lots of things going on in India that would scare the shit out of even the least safety-conscious western farmer.
rants_unnecessarily@piefed.social · 2 pts · 4d
Poisons are poisons, no matter if they are "biological" or "chemical".
"Bio" is basically just green washing.
ooli3@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 4d
Insert meme: If those "green" people could read, they would be very angry