In 1982, the luster of the “Green Revolution” was beginning to fade. The promised dramatic increases in yields from “miracle” hybrid grains that required high inputs of water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides failed to deliver and were revealed as campaigns to sell technology to growers who couldn’t afford it.
The global pesticide trade was yielding dramatic profits as more and more farmers were trapped on a dangerous pesticide treadmill. The “Circle of Poison” was a growing global concern, as pesticides banned in some countries were exported to others, only to return as health-harming residues on food imports.
That was the world when PAN was founded, at a meeting in Penang, Malaysia of concerned activists from around the world.
Chemical-intensive, monocrop, irrigated agriculture, introduced in the Global South in the 1950s, boosted crop yields dramatically at first, but by the ’70s, the costs in health, ecological damage, and lost biodiversity were mounting — and pests were growing resistant to chemical inputs. Workers in the fields, including women and children, bore the brunt of pesticide exposure and were seeing dire health impacts.
In PAN’s first two decades, many countries banned the “Dirty Dozen Pesticides” in response to our global campaign, and alternatives to the Green Revolution model gained traction and prominence. In Indonesia, for example, when rice production was collapsing in the 1980s due to pest resurgence from resistance to pesticides, community-scale peer-learning projects recaptured Indigenous farming knowledge and wove it into 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.
By 2002, more than one million Indonesian farmers had participated in Field Schools that became models for localized sustainable agriculture in other countries.