Protect pollinators from pesticides before it’s too late!

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently announced plans to strengthen ties with Croplife International -- a trade association representing pesticide manufacturers like Bayer-Monsanto and Syngenta. This toxic alliance puts people and pollinators at risk.

Pollinators are disappearing before our eyes. We need your help to stop the pesticide industry from pushing its deadly products at the UN and globally.

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To: Qu Dongyu, UN Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization

Dear Director-General Qu Dongyu,

I writing to express my deep concern over your plans to strengthen official ties with CropLife International. I strongly urge you to reconsider this alliance.

This collaboration with CropLife, an association of corporations which produce and promote dangerous pesticides, directly undermines FAO’s priority of minimizing the harms of chemical pesticide use worldwide. Reliance on hazardous pesticides undermines the right to an adequate food supply and community health for present and future generations. More than one third of CropLife member company sales are Highly Hazardous Pesticides that pose the highest levels of risk to health or the environment.

Recent estimates show that there are 385 million cases of acute pesticide poisonings each year, up from an estimated 25 million cases in 1990. This means that about 44% of farmers and agricultural workers around the world are poisoned each year by an industry dominated by CropLife members. Pesticide products produced by CropLife member companies decimate pollinator populations and are wreaking havoc on biodiversity and already fragile ecosystems.

CropLife’s sole purpose is to advocate for use of its members’ products — which are both antiquated chemical solutions and techno-fixes (genetically modified seeds) that lock farmers into ever-escalating use of pesticides, in conjunction with proprietary seeds that have systematically undermined the rights and welfare of the majority of the world’s food producers. A partnership with CropLife represents a perpetuation of this deeply unjust and unsustainable system. It undercuts your agency’s critical — and urgently needed — support for agroecology, which FAO itself notes “can support food production and food security and nutrition while restoring the ecosystem services and biodiversity that are essential for sustainable agriculture.”

I strongly urge you to continue to support the transition to people-led agroecology and discontinue this deeply inappropriate alliance with an industry that places the interests of profit above that of public welfare and the planet.

Sincerely,
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