Hazardous pesticides, developed and brought to market by German agrochemical firms Bayer and BASF, are damaging the health of farmworkers and farmers in South Africa. According to a new report by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, the Inkota Netzwerk and Pan Germany, six of eight active ingredients that have been deemed carcinogenic, reprotoxic (interfering with human reproduction) and mutagenic (capable of inducing heritable genetic defects or increasing their incidence), can be found on the South African agrochemicals market; four from Bayer and two from BASF.
For Jan Urhahn, the programme director for food sovereignty at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, the report, Double Standards and Hazardous Pesticides from Bayer and BASF, exposes the double standards in the global trade in pesticides.
“The issue at hand regards pesticide products and active ingredients that are either banned or not approved in the European Union due to health or environmental concerns but that are nevertheless exported out of the EU by agrochemical corporations and are then sold in other regions of the world,” he told mg.co.za/environment.
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