Each year, the EU exports more than 120,000 tonnes of pesticides that are banned from utilize on European farms, primarily to Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Current rules require EU-based firms to submit an ‘export notification’ detailing the intfinished utilizes and shipment volumes for these products, but beyond that, once they have been sold there are no further controls.
But there is now growing public and political pressure on the EU to impose a complete ban on selling these pesticides beyond the bloc’s borders.
A report published by Greenpeace last week found that 48 percent of the pesticides utilized in food production in South Africa, Ghana and Kenya are highly-hazardous pesticides and are currently banned in the EU.
In the past, such a report would have been a minor headache for the European Commission; just a casing of riding out a couple of days of negative press headlines.
But it is the latest in a series of damaging critiques of EU policy.
After a similar report last year focutilized on the deaths of farm workers exposed to banned pesticides, headlines in the Kenyan media accutilized the EU of ‘exporting death’.
In March, a group of South African judges informed the European Parliament that six children in Johannesburg died in 2024 from exposure to Terbufos, a highly-hazardous organophosphate pesticide.
Terbufos, which is manufactured by the American Vanguard Corporation (AMVAC), was banned last year in South Africa, but dozens of EU built chemicals and pesticides, including paraquat, a toxic herbicide linked to Parkinson’s disease, are still being sold and utilized.
In Kenya, meanwhile, a major lawsuit against a group of European and US chemical giants is currently in court.
Civil society activists inform EUobserver that the main block on a complete ban is coming from the office of the commission president.
Ursula von der Leyen does not want to draw the ire of her countest’s chemical industest, of which BASF is the world’s market leader. The commission had promised to introduce legislation for a complete ban but, five years after , an impact assessment was ordered, it is still yet to see the light of day.
The chemicals industest is one of Europe’s most lucrative with an estimated annual turnover of around €650bn.
European firms might contfinish that they are fighting competition from China and that if they don’t sell these pesticides others will. Besides, nothing is stopping foreign governments from imposing their own bans.
South Africa and Kenya are two of Africa’s four largest economies and among the most politically-important African countries to the EU.
In the case of South Africa, the EU has utilized the US Trump administration’s diplomatic war against president Cyril Ramaphosa – which has seen the US impose hefty tariffs on South African exports and falsely accutilize the government of ‘genocide’ against white farmers – to rebuild its own relationship with Pretoria.
A revamped trade deal is being nereceivediated, and the EU is footing a large chunk of the bill for South Africa’s green energy transition.
The question is whether by allowing their firms to sell to Africans pesticides which are deemed to be dangerous to the health of Europeans, the EU is doing long-term political damage to its reputation.
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