CropLife toxic products
Zimyl Adler

Zimyl Adler

International update: March 2023

Early Spring Greetings from PANNA’s International Team! As our work is often fast-moving and technical, we thought you might enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at who we are, some exciting recent wins, and what’s ahead this year.

Thanks for reading!

Simone, Marcia, and Emily
International Team

Who is the PAN International Network?

In 1982, activists from 17 countries gathered in Malaysia to work together on eliminating the toxic chemical pesticides that drive industrial agriculture. They decided to build a global movement to halt the poisoning of farmworkers and ecosystems, block the global trade in hazardous pesticides, and promote just and sustainable solutions. Pesticide Action Network was born.

Today, PANNA is one of 5 regional centers that, along with PAN Africa, PAN Asia Pacific, PAN Latin America and PAN Europe, form the core of PAN International, a global network of hundreds of community groups and national organizations representing farmers, workers, health, human rights and environmental advocates and more. Here at PANNA, we work daily with PAN colleagues in Argentina, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Benin, Senegal, Ethiopia, Mexico, the UK, Germany, and elsewhere. Across the regional centers, we work with many other social movement partners around the world.

PAN’s ambitious goal is to replace HHPs with agroecology by 2030. Through our campaigns, we seek to build policymaker and public support for agroecological practices; advance HHP bans internationally; end the double standard allowing HHPs to be dumped in the Global South; and expose and challenge corporate capture of international policy processes.

The Team

Simone Adler (organizing co-director) leads PANNA’s International Team and co-coordinates the PAN International campaign: Stop the FAO-CropLife #ToxicAllaince. With Ilang-Ilang Quijano of PAN Asia Pacific and a global coalition, they mobilize public pressure on the UN FAO to end its partnership with the pesticide industry. Simone participates in PAN International’s Advocacy Working Group, which coordinates advocacy across international pesticide policy processes.

Marcia Ishii (senior scientist) just celebrated a milestone of 27 years at PANNA! In addition to holding the Regional Coordinator role for PANNA in the International Network, she leads PAN International’s Agroecology Working Group which provides evidence of ecological alternatives to HHPs (Highly Hazardous Pesticides) and promotes agroecology for healthy livelihoods, food sovereignty, climate resilience and biodiversity protection.

Emily Marquez (senior scientist) focuses on collecting data on active ingredients in pesticide formulas that contribute to acute pesticide poisonings. Emily is a member of PAN International’s HHPs Working Group and participates on behalf of PAN in the technical review committee for the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPRC). POPRC is currently reviewing the nomination of chlorpyrifos. Emily recently co-authored a research paper that provided a global estimate of unintentional acute pesticide poisonings – the first such global estimate since a study done in 1990.

Taylor Atienza is our International Advocacy & Research intern for winter and spring 2023, a student at UC Berkeley focused on global studies and food systems. She is working with Simone on media and material development for the Stop the #ToxicAlliance campaign.

Sophie Perry is currently a Research Fellow at PAN who is authoring a science-policy brief for the PAN Agroecology Workgroup on ecological alternatives to chlorpyrifos in banana production systems. This brief will be shared with decisionmakers during the POPRC for adding chlorpyrifos to the list of chemicals targeted for a global ban under the Stockholm Convention.

Key wins in 2022

  • We marked a major win in the Stop the #ToxicAlliance campaign when the Deputy Director General of FAO and other high-level FAO leadership met with PAN and our coalition partners, and stated that FAO will NOT advance further in its engagement with CropLife International. This came on the heels of major mobilization of 450 civil society and Indigenous people’s organizations across the world putting pressure on the FAO Council. Read more here, and check out our recent IG story here
  • For the first time, explicit pesticide reduction targets have been included in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The CBD’s 15th Conference of Parties formally adopted a global target for 2030 of reducing the risk from pesticides by one-half – a major win that PAN has been focused on for years. PAN UK’s policy briefs were distributed by partners to their government representatives and provided technical expertise during the COP that enabled partners to effectively intervene.
  • Thanks to the leadership of PAN Germany, Germany is moving forward on prohibiting the export of EU-banned pesticides! This legal ruling will go into effect this spring, making Germany the second member state in the EU with such a law, after France. Germany is a major pesticide producing and exporting country, home to Bayer, the world’s biggest pesticide corporation. This win signals that human rights violations linked to the export of HHPs to the Global South is a double standard that cannot be ignored.

What’s ahead in 2023

Pesticides are a climate justice issue. As we move forward this year, we’re working with partners in the movement to end the fossil fuel extractivist economy and strengthen our advocacy of agroecology – not industrial agriculture – as a climate solution.

Our new report Pesticides and Climate Change: A Vicious Cycle offers critical scientific evidence to how pesticides cause climate change and why we need international support for agroecology. We’ll be joining in solidarity with our comrades in PAN Asia Pacific who are participating in a climate caravan mobilization leading up to the Climate COP28 in December!

We’re working strategically across the Network to push for stronger action on HHPs and get more pesticides listed in the Rotterdam Convention. We’ll be mobilizing around the Global Alliance on Highly Hazardous Pesticides, which was just proposed by the Africa Region at the recent International Conference on Chemical Management (ICCM). This Alliance would help achieve a global phase-out of HHPs and adoption of sustainable alternatives under the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM).

Take action with us on World Health Day, April 7th!

The Stop the #ToxicAlliance campaign is organizing a Global Day of Action on social media to expose CropLife and its members’ messaging around global health and the real impacts of HHPs. Follow @pesticideaction to join in and share our messages.

Zimyl Adler

Zimyl Adler

Zimyl Adler is is PAN's Organizing Co-Director, bringing their grassroots experience to PAN’s national and international teams. Zimyl comes to PAN with a decade of experience organizing in local and global movements for food sovereignty and economic justice, and is deeply committed to building power through solidarity for our collective liberation. They enjoy making art for the queer revolution, and play clarinet in a Klezmer band, Shpilkis, in Seattle.

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