Pesticides |
Two United Nations
human rights experts are calling for a comprehensive new global treaty
to regulate and phase out the use of dangerous pesticides in farming,
and move towards sustainable agricultural practices.
"Excessive use of
pesticides are very dangerous to human health, to the environment and it
is misleading to claim they are vital to ensuring food security," the
Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver, and the Special
Rapporteur on Toxics, Baskut Tuncak, said in a joint statement to the
Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The Special
Rapporteurs pointed to research showing that pesticides were responsible
for an estimated 200,000 acute poisoning deaths each year. Some 99 per
cent of fatalities occurred in developing countries where health, safety
and environmental regulations were weaker.
Chronic exposure to
pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.
Farmers and agricultural workers, communities living near plantations,
indigenous communities and pregnant women and children are particularly
vulnerable to pesticide exposure and require special protections.
The experts
particularly emphasized the obligation of States to protect the rights
of children from hazardous pesticides, also warning that certain
pesticides can persist in the environment for decades and pose a threat
to the entire ecological system on which food production depends.
While acknowledging
that certain international treaties currently offer protection from the
use of a few pesticides, they stressed that a global treaty to regulate
the vast majority of them throughout their life cycle does not yet
exist, leaving a critical gap in the human rights protection framework.
"Without
harmonized, stringent regulations on the production, sale and acceptable
levels of pesticide use, the burden of the negative effects of
pesticides is felt by poor and vulnerable communities in countries that
have less stringent enforcement mechanisms," they emphasized.
Special Rapporteurs
and independent experts are appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human
Rights Council to examine and report back on a specific human rights
theme or a country situation. The positions are honorary and the experts
are not UN staff, nor are they paid for their work.
No comments:
Post a Comment