PESTICIDE USE

Governments meeting at a recent UN world food body(1) in Rome failed to adopt a new international code for pesticide use aimed at renewing the fight against pesticide hazards in developing countries.

While deaths and illness from pesticides remain at an all-time high, the urgency of taking action has been delayed over different interpretations on patents and data protection. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Conference meets only every two years to set policy. 

The Conference did not adopt a new code of conduct because of an article that deals with the registration procedure of intellectual property rights,’ said Niek Van der Graaff, chief of FAO’s plant protection service. The key stumbling block related to the interpretation of government obligations to protect company packages of information on the health, environment and efficacy impacts of their products from rivals – an issue already covered by the so-called Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (Trips) agreement in the World Trade Organisation(2). 

Over the last two years, more than 50 deaths have been recorded from cotton pesticides in Benin, 16 deaths from a hazardous mixture of three pesticides used in groundnut production in Senegal, and in Peru 24 children died after a pesticide was accidentally introduced into food distributed in a village school. Thousands more deaths go unrecorded, or the pesticides responsible are not traced. Ill-health is regularly misdiagnosed.

Dr Van der Graaff pointed out that ‘Each pesticide has a certain risk to human health and the environment,’ and the Code plays a key role in setting standards in developing countries. While the International Code of Conduct on the Distribution and Use of Pesticides3 is voluntary, it is supported by the major pesticide corporations, forming part of the constitution of the industry association, CropLife International, which has indicated it will adopt the revised version – but only with the inclusion of data protection recognition. 

Although the Code has been in place since 1985, the revised version made sweeping changes, drawing strongly on the experience of 15 years of trying to implement it at national level. The new Code addressed weaknesses in the existing version – which said nothing of obsolete stocks of pesticides, for example, and does not recognise innovative work with farmers through Integrated Pest Management (IPM) or organic agriculture. The revision recommends that the most acutely toxic pesticides should not be used in developing countries; that pesticides are not necessarily part of an IPM system, and that companies should not advertise their products as ‘IPM compatible’.

With two new Conventions covering pesticides, and renewed efforts to dispose of the enormous quantities of hazardous obsolete stocks of pesticides leaking into the environment – over 50,000 tonnes in Africa alone – the new Code will recommend a ‘cradle to grave’ approach, guiding developing countries to implement tried and accepted standards, and establishing a vital link between disposal and prevention.

The fiasco in Rome followed an objection from Argentina – supported by all Latin America countries – to the guidance on protection of a company’s pesticide registration data package, in spite of wording that reflects the status quo in most countries, and which recognises the over-riding role of national legislation. The objection may have been influenced by Argentina’s generic pesticide industry, threatened with a WTO dispute for using data packages from research-based agrochemical companies to register its own products. 

The Code text had been through many government consultations and government-delegated expert-committee recommendations, and the eleventh hour rejection by Latin American countries took other governments by surprise. The FAO was requested to set up meetings of government-designated experts to find an acceptable solution. If a compromise is found, governments authorised the next meeting of the FAO governing council in November 2002 to formally adopt it.

This may be a way ahead. But in the meantime the momentum to drive forward a new agreement has been lost. PAN groups will be closely monitoring progress over the next year. (BD)

References
1. 31st Biennial Conference of the FAO, Rome, 2-13 November 2001.
2. Article 37.3 of the Trips Agreement covers pesticide registration.
3. The International Code of Conduct on the Distribution and Use of Pesticides was first agreed at the 1985 FAO Biennial Conference, amended in 1989.