May 2021 | ISSUE 125
PESTICIDE NEWS
An international perspective on the health & environmental effects of pesticides
THE PARAQUAT PAPERS A major new investigation from Unearthed and Public Eye
Organisations mobilise to reduce UK pesticide use PesticideFree London committments
Hazard vs risk: a new briefing
THE PARAQUAT PAPERS: How Syngenta's bad science helped keep the world's deadliest weedkiller on the market By Crispin Dowler (Unearthed) & Laurent Gaberell (Public Eye) The weedkiller paraquat is estimated to have killed tens of thousands of people since it was first sold. In a major new Unearthed and Public Eye investigation, hundreds of internal company documents and an insider’s testimony have revealed how one of the world’s biggest pesticide companies used manipulated data and ineffective ‘safety’ measures to keep it on the market despite the deaths. Warunika was only 16-years-old when she took a swallow from an old bottle of Gramoxone weedkiller she found hidden on a ledge above a toilet in her family home. Her parents are sure she had not intended to die. She was cooking eggs and fish for dinner when her hungry little brother came in, trying to grab things from her and hurry her along. They argued and she ended up hitting him with a broom. Their mother, Kumarihami, intervened, and while she was tending to the bump on her son’s head her daughter grew scared and “very silent”. The next thing Kumarihami knew, Warunika had taken the bottle and poured some liquid into her mouth. Then she threw it at her mother and said, “here, I drank this.” “She did it to frighten me,” says Kumarihami. Warunika died in hospital the following day.
The bottle she had grabbed was in her home because her parents were small-scale farmers, and at the time it was what they used to clear weeds from their few acres of rice fields in the northern central province of Sri Lanka. Her father, Dharmasiri, says the bottle was old and had little left in it. “She probably thought since it was an old bottle it would not have been that potent.” But it had contained a concentrated solution of paraquat, one of the world’s most acutely toxic herbicides. As little as 10ml - a tablespoonful - of Gramoxone can be fatal, and there is no antidote. Most people who swallow it do not survive. At the time Warunika died, around 20 years ago, paraquat was causing hundreds of deaths a year in Sri Lanka. No one knows the total number of people who have died from swallowing this chemical since the British company Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) first put Gramoxone on the market in 1962. But according to one leading global authority on pesticide poisoning, University of Edinburgh professor of clinical toxicology Michael Eddleston, the figure must be at least in the tens of thousands. On the front cover: Prof. Jon Heylings. Credit: Unearthed
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Warunika's father looks at a portrait of his daughter. Credit: Sachindra Perera / Public Eye
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In the mid-1980s, Japan was seeing more than 1,000 deaths a year. Countries including Sri Lanka, South Korea, Taiwan and China have all seen hundreds of deaths a year at times. Fatal poisonings have been recorded in places as diverse as the United States, Trinidad, Brazil, Costa Rica, Malaysia, South Africa, Fiji, and India. Many people - including many children - have died from accidentally taking a sip of paraquat that someone had stored in a drink bottle. Many more have died in circumstances like Warunika’s - impulsive acts of self-harm that have more to do with a moment of stress than with any considered wish to die. In either situation, it is easy for a momentary mistake to be fatal, because the product allows almost no margin of error. Perhaps unsurprisingly, more than 50 countries have now banned paraquat. Sri Lanka itself phased out the weedkiller altogether from 2008, a few years after Warunika’s death. Syngenta, the Swiss-headquartered, Chinese-owned agrochemical giant that inherited ICI’s pesticides business, continues to export thousands of tonnes of paraquat each year from its factory in the north of England although the UK, Switzerland and China have all banned its use on their own soil.1 The company says paraquat is a “safe and effective herbicide when used as directed on the label”.2 It argues that almost “all modern innovations - buildings, bridges, railways, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, machines, and crop protection products - have been used for suicide” and that society needs to “focus on mental health issues, not deprive the world of useful technology”.
Syngenta claims it has “helped address the problem of accidental ingestion” with the ‘safening’ agents it has added to Gramoxone since the 70s - a dye and an odour to warn people not to drink it, and an ‘emetic’ drug, to induce vomiting.3 It also claims product safety is “extremely important to us”, and that Syngenta has “led the continuous improvement of paraquat in the five decades since its invention”. But now, a lawsuit in the US has unearthed an enormous cache of internal company documents which reveals that Syngenta and its predecessors knew for decades that the emetic in Gramoxone did little or nothing to prevent poisoning deaths but continued to present it as effective to regulators and the public. The documents show how ICI successfully used the addition of this drug to Gramoxone to help keep the product on the market at a time when it faced real threats of being banned in key markets; that it saw this patented additive as a way of blocking competition from other paraquat manufacturers; that the company continued with these strategies despite knowing it had no evidence the emetic would save lives at the concentration in which it was added; that it was repeatedly told by its own scientists that the amount of emetic in Gramoxone was too low to prevent fatal poisonings; and that it consistently resisted the widespread introduction of safety measures like dilution because it did not consider them to be “economically acceptable” solutions to “the suicide problem”.
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1. https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2020/09/10/ banned-pesticides-eu-export-poor-countries 2. https://www.syngenta.com/en/protecting-crops/ products-list/paraquat 3. http://paraquat.com/en/safety/regulation
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A fighting chance That this story can be told at all has much to do with the efforts of one man - a British scientist called Jon Heylings. Heylings is a senior toxicologist, and an honorary professor of toxicology at Keele University, where for more than a decade he has run a successful company that offers specialist methods for safety testing chemicals without the use of animal experiments. But, before that, he worked for 22 years at Syngenta and its predecessors, leading work to develop safer formulations of paraquat. And he is now speaking out, for the first time publicly, to repeat what he first told his superiors at the company more than three decades ago - that he believes the Gramoxone Syngenta still sells in many countries is a lot less safe than it could be. Heylings’ warnings are focussed on the emetic added to Syngenta’s paraquat products, a chemical codenamed PP796. The point of this additive is to reduce the product’s toxicity by causing people who swallow it to vomit out the paraquat before a fatal dose can be absorbed into the bloodstream. But Heylings argues the amount of PP796 added to standard Gramoxone is far too little to trigger prompt vomiting in most people who swallow a ‘minimal lethal dose’ of the weedkiller. He alleges this is because the concentration is based on a single “fabricated” internal report from 1976, in which a now-dead ICI toxicologist named Michael Rose manipulated data from a small-scale clinical trial to wrongly suggest humans were ten times more sensitive to PP796 than any of the three animal species it was tested on. When Heylings first discovered the failings in the Rose report, in 1990, he documented his
findings in a series of memos to his superiors. In these memos he advised that Rose’s work had “grossly misled” the business, that the concentration recommended by Rose was “probably well below an effective emetic dose in man”, and that a sharp increase in the concentration of emetic in Gramoxone could “reduce the number of fatalities attributed to paraquat poisoning”. But, to this day, Syngenta still manufactures Gramoxone with the same concentration of PP796 it has had since the 70s. Not only this, but the company has persuaded the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) to adopt this concentration of PP796 as a global specification, in the agency’s guidance on the standards all paraquat-based weedkillers should meet. When Heylings discovered, in 2018, that the FAO was still using this standard, he again attempted to sound the alarm about the emetic, first in meetings and correspondence with Syngenta, then with the FAO and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “I have nothing against Syngenta,” he wrote in a 2019 email to the FAO. “I just want the next child that accidently takes a sip of paraquat weedkiller to have a fighting chance of survival by vomiting the poison out before a lethal dose is absorbed into the blood and they die of pulmonary failure.
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While Heylings was writing these emails, lawyers at the US firm Korein Tillery were getting ready to take Syngenta to court on behalf of a group of farmers who developed Parkinson’s disease after using paraquat to kill weeds. At some point in their investigation they found references to Heylings. With his guidance, they combed through the decades-worth of paraquat documents Syngenta had been forced to release to them through discovery proceedings, and unearthed the material that told the full history of PP796. When their case goes to trial, that history will be part of it. Stephen Tillery, lead counsel in the lawsuit, told Unearthed and Public Eye the “emetic issue” was part of his case because it demonstrated “the lengths to which this company will go to keep paraquat on the market”. He added: “Paraquat was about to be banned in the 1970s because of the number of people who had died agonizing deaths from ingesting it. “By claiming that the emetic would make paraquat safer to use they managed to keep paraquat on the market.” Syngenta rejects Heylings’ allegations, and denies its decisions about the emetic were motivated by anything other than the desire to make paraquat safer. “While it may sound appealing on first encounter,” a Syngenta spokesman said, “Heylings’ argument that increasing the level of emetic
improves the safety of the product is overly simplistic; the reality is complex and modern medical and scientific opinion does not support Heylings’ viewpoint.” He added: “We reject any suggestion that in developing this product Syngenta and its predecessor companies had any motive other than to find the most appropriate level of emetic in paraquat to best address the risk from accidental and deliberate ingestion.”He added that the US EPA and the FAO had “not changed their recommendation about the emetic” since being contacted by Heylings. The FAO itself told Unearthed and Public Eye it had held a “special session” to review its paraquat specifications in response to Heylings’ concerns, and its report was “currently being finalised”. For Jon Heylings, it is no small thing to find himself speaking out against the company he worked at for decades. Heylings enjoyed his career at Syngenta, and counts many of his former colleagues as friends. But he is determined to see this through. “I want to be able to look back with my own grandchildren and say, I'm glad I did that,” he tells Unearthed and Public Eye.“I know it took a long time to get the message through. I tried my best in the early 1990s, but I’m trying again now to convince Syngenta that they were wrong with the emetic concentration. And that’s what’s keeping me going.”
NOTE: This article is an excerpt of an investigation originally published by Unearthed and Public Eye. You can read the full, in depth article, as well as videos and supporting documents at: https://www.publiceye.ch/en/topics/pesticides/how-syngentas-bad-sciencehelped-keep-the-worlds-deadliest-weedkiller-on-the-market
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UK PESTICIDE REGULATION AT A CROSSROADS? By Dr Keith Tyrell, Director, PAN UK Risk management is at the heart of the regulation of hazardous substances including pesticides, but risk management decisions involve a tradeoff between effectiveness, complexity, cost and access to products. A new briefing from PAN UK unpicks the strengths and weaknesses of two of the main models of pesticide risk management – the so-called “hazardbased” and “risk-based” approaches. In spite of some flaws, the EU’s approach to regulating pesticides is often described as the strongest in the world. Part of its strength lies in its use of “cut-off criteria” which screen out pesticides with certain hazardous characteristics at a very early stage of the authorisation process. This is a version of the "hazard-based" model which follows the principle that if an active substance is intrinsically hazardous – for instance by being able to cause cancer or persistent pollution – then it is simply too dangerous to be used safely and should not be authorised. In contrast, “risk-based” models – such as those favoured by the US or Australia – place more emphasis on managing the risks of pesticides during use, for example by using personal protective equipment or training users to follow certain practices.
A hazard-based approach is more effective at protecting human health and the environment. It is simpler and cheaper to administer and is in line with health and safety principles used in other high-risk industries. It is well-accepted in these industries that the most effective and economically efficient way of controlling risks is to eliminate the hazard at source. In contrast, managing risks during use is much less reliable. No matter how well trained, or aware of the risks, people make mistakes, they let their guard down they cut corners when they are in a hurry – accidents happen. Trying to control risks during use will never be as effective as removing the hazard at source. This is especially critical for pesticides because if any of the control systems break down, the potential consequences for human health and the environment are severe and sometimes irreversible.
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The debate is not just academic for the UK. With its exit from the EU, the UK is now free to set its own environmental rules and some groups are actively lobbying for a move away from the hazard-based approach with the aim of increasing the range of pesticides available. What is more, large agricultural economies like Australia and the US see the UK’s current pesticide rules as a key target in trade negotiations. While advocates for moving away from the current regulatory model use benign-sounding phrases, such as “science-based” to describe the alternative, there is little doubt that moving to a risk-based approach, would result in an increase in the number – and toxicity – of pesticides approved for use in the UK. To cope with a wider range of more hazardous pesticides being used, the UK would need to introduce much tougher controls and massively scale up its capacity to monitor the implementation and effectiveness of the rules on the ground. Sadly, the UK’s record of farm inspections and enforcing environmental rules is woeful. Yet, even with comprehensive checks and procedures, a risk-based approach will not be as effective as the UK’s existing model. The chance of failure exists even with the most complex of risk management systems, let alone those that rely on end users to behave in a particular way.
The critical questions for pesticide regulators – and society – are: What is an acceptable level of protection from pesticide-related harms? How much are we willing to pay for the system to keep this level of protection? And who should foot the bill? The argument around hazard-based vs risk-based approaches is therefore, in effect, a debate about the level of risk that a society is willing to tolerate. Those countries which have adopted hazard-based regulatory models have come to the conclusion that some pesticides are so dangerous that the level of risk that they will tolerate can only be achieved by preventing exposure to the hazard – i.e. banning them. Those that have chosen to follow a risk-based approach, have concluded that another measure – or combination of measures – can achieve the desired level of protection. Experience from countries which have adopted riskbased approaches to pesticide regulation clearly shows that this model is not as effective as a hazardbased system so, in practice, it means they have accepted a higher level of risk. It is firmly in the UK’s interest to maintain and strengthen its current hazard-based approach to pesticide management to protect environmental and human health and to minimise regulatory complexity and cost. Find the full briefing at: https://www.pan-uk.org/hazardversus-risk
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IMPACTS OF PESTICIDES ON CARIBBEAN FARMING COMMUNITIES By Dr Alex Stuart, International Project Manager, PAN UK In recent years, there has been an increasing trend of pesticide imports into the Caribbean, with close to 10,000 tonnes imported in 2018 for agricultural use alone. These include highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs), which pose a significant risk to human health and biodiversity. For example, a recent survey of 542 smallholder vegetable farmers in Trinidad and Jamaica by the University of the West Indies (UWI) and PAN UK, revealed that 59% and 14% of farmers, respectively, reported signs and symptoms consistent with acute or severe pesticide poisoning during the previous 12 months. Many farmers also reported suffering multiple incidents over the year. These incidents often resulted in time being taken off work to recover, with consequential loss of income. The vast majority of these incidents were linked to products containing lambda cyhalothrin, alpha cypermethrin and paraquat, all of which are HHPs. In a survey on pesticide container management in Jamaica, a farmer reported that his grandmother tragically died after accidentally ingesting pesticide that was stored in a soda drinks bottle. Such reports highlight some of the concerns relating to pesticide use in the region. However, farmers in the Caribbean are highly dependent on pesticide use for crop production, with many
using highly toxic chemical pesticides as the first line of defence against pests and diseases. Even though they may be aware of the health risks, few have access to suitable training and alternatives to enable them to produce healthy crops without relying on hazardous pesticides. To address such issues, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) began a project funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), involving PAN UK, UWI and Caribbean regulatory authorities from 11 countries. PAN conducted surveys on pesticide management and acute pesticide poisonings, consulted key stakeholders, and developed a series of guidance notes for integrated pest management, focusing on alternative approaches to HHP use. This culminated in the development of a HHP regional risk reduction plan for the Caribbean concerning pesticide management and HHPs in particular, that was endorsed by the Caribbean Group of Pesticide Control Boards in March 2021. The hope is that the HHP regional risk reduction plan will provide a focus for coordinated action and resource mobilization to build upon the significant advances made under the FAO project so as to better protect health, livelihoods and biodiversity in the region.
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Many farmers reported signs and symptoms consistent with acute or severe pesticide poisoning during the previous 12 months.
Avocado farm workers spraying fields with chemicals and not wearing any protection in Dominican Republic. Credit: Shutterstock.
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Running chickens to graze amongst bananas as a form of weed management. Credit: Gustavo Gandini
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AGROECOLOGICAL WEED MANAGEMENT IN BANANAS By Gustavo Gandini, BANELINO, Dominican Republic PAN UK recently collaborated with the UN Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and policy makers in the Caribbean region on ways to reduce and phase out Highly Hazardous Pesticides. Regional expert, Gustavo Gandini from the Dominican Republic, talks here about the agroecological approach to weed management developed over two decades with organic banana producers:
• Use of ground cover plants, either leaving species to grow naturally but keeping them at a height of no more than 15-20 cm, or planting so called ‘service plants’, usually legumes, e.g. Canavalia, Mucuna bean, to cover the soil. Farmers report that with cover plants they can reduce their manual weeding costs by 80%, needing only to keep plants off the young banana stems.
Firstly I should say that the word ‘weed’ does not exist in organic language! Calling them ‘herbs’ instead leads to a different way of managing them and generating added value. We use the following methods to keep these plants at manageable levels within organic banana systems.
• Use of weed killing inputs permitted in organic systems. Some producers have found using high concentration soap has a herbicidal effect. Using undiluted biofermentation products on herb foliage exerts a burning effect, as well as providing soil nutrients after the dead material is incorporated as organic matter.
• Biodiverse cropping models, with at least three species (cocoa, coconut, soursop, moringa and noncompetitive ground cover) reduce sunlight, create competition and supply organic matter for mulch. • Planting banana at higher density, combined with rational management of nitrogen, helps shade out unwanted species. • Bananas produce large quantities of organic matter that generate a mulch cover which is renewed weekly.
• Grazing animals in the banana crop to feed on vegetation. Chickens can be allowed to graze from early morning until afternoon. We use up to 30 hens per hectare, which only occasionally require monitoring. Alternatively, a maximum of 2 goats or sheep per hectare can graze, as long as there is some herby vegetation present, otherwise they may browse the young banana suckers.
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• Considering all these herbs as raw material for composting encourages farmers to cut, collect and process them and then apply them as a nutritive source, with economic benefits and more self-sufficient farm input management. Many agroecological techniques are mutually supportive. For example, by not applying chemical contact or systemic fungicides to manage
Sigatoka disease, organic banana farmers benefit from more biodiverse decomposer soil microorganisms, recycling organic matter more efficiently and maintaining a stable mulch cover. In contrast, soils under conventional systems are poor in beneficial fungi and tend to rapidly decline in organic matter. What would help spread agroecological approaches to more farmers are studies to validate and quantify the benefits.
BANELINO is an association of over 300 organic banana smallholders in the Dominican Republic. More information at: https://banelino.com.do Image below: Ground cover plants between banana rows substantially reduce need for manual weeding. Credit: Gustavo Gandini
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ACTION NEEDED TO PHASE-OUT HIGHLY HAZARDOUS PESTICIDES BY 2030 By Susan Haffmans, PAN Germany PAN has recently published an updated list of Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) and an updated PAN International Consolidated List of Banned Pesticides. Both documents provide transparency and guidance to drive political action among all stakeholders involved in pesticides management, from politicians and policy makers, to farmer organisations, environmental groups, food traders and bee keepers. The PAN list of Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) is the only global list that helps identify HHPs, facilitating prioritisation of pesticide replacement with non-chemical alternatives. The PAN International Consolidated List of Banned Pesticides gives a unique overview of all pesticides that are banned by countries around the world. Both documents show an alarming number of highly hazardous pesticides still in use and they demonstrate the very uneven regulation of hazardous pesticides around the globe. However, the documents also give hope as they illustrate that many countries are already phasing out a wide range of HHPs for the benefit of people’s health, biodiversity and the environment. The updated lists contribute to more transparency and knowledge about highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs). This is particularly valuable in light of the latest pesticide poisoning
figures which show that, worldwide, 385 million people are poisoned by pesticides every year, concerns about the chemical industry’s influence on policy makers and the human rights-damaging practice of wealthy states like UK and Germany exporting hazardous pesticides banned in their own country to other countries. It has long been recognised by international institutions such as UNEP, FAO and SAICM that global action is needed to better protect people and the environment from HHPs. But civil society, rural communities, pesticide victims and others have waited in vain for action so far. With the release of the two lists, PAN International gives policy makers a valuable tool to help them take action and underscores the urgent need to rapidly phase out the use of highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs). The new PAN HHP List identifies 385 pesticides that are especially hazardous for health or environmental reasons because they are highly toxic, cause long term chronical illness like cancer, impair reproduction, or are a threat to biodiversity because they are highly hazardous to bees, for example. Find links to both updated documents at: https://www.pan-uk.org/actionneeded-to-phase-out-highlyhazardous-pesticides-by-2030
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UNPRECEDENTED SUPPORT FOR THE UK TO DRASTICALLY REDUCE PESTICIDE USE By Sarah Haynes, The Pesticide Collaboration Over the last few months, PAN UK and RSPB have mobilised 45 organisations and individual farmers and academics to respond collectively to the UK Government’s public consultation on the revised UK National Action Plan for the Sustainable Use of Pesticides (NAP). The NAP is the best opportunity in a generation to reduce pesticide-related harms in the UK, so it was crucial that we came together to speak with one voice. The final submission sent to the Government represented just under 3.5 million UK citizens who are members of the various farming networks, trade unions, health and environment focussed NGOs who lent their support. In addition, approximately 200,000 members of the public signed petitions and wrote directly to Defra, expressing concern at current levels of pesticide use and support for drastic reduction.
When finalised, the new NAP will set the vision and direction of travel for pesticide use across the UK for at least the next five years. If the Government opts to include our joint recommendations then this vision will include support for farmers working with nature to help address the ecological and biodiversity crisis; flourishing plant and wildlife in our towns and cities, better protections for pollinators; and safer working conditions for farmers and council employees, currently working in close proximity to dangerous chemicals. Or, the approach set out in the revised NAP could ignore the mounting evidence of pesticide-related harms and choose to go with ‘business as usual’: exposing the public to cocktails of chemicals in their food; depleting soils, furthering impacts on already struggling insect life and the bird populations who rely on them for food; and pesticides routinely sprayed around schools, playgrounds and hospitals.
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To achieve the more sustainable future we know is possible – supporting nature and safeguarding human health – a drastic reduction in pesticide use is crucial, and needs to be the aim that underpins the new NAP.
• A commitment to phase-out the use of pesticides in certain areas (e.g. urban areas) as well as pesticides of particular concern for wildlife, endangered plants and fungi or human health.
To support this vision, there are three key things we and the public have collectively called on Defra to include in the final NAP:
How the UK chooses to govern pesticides will have profound implications for the health of citizens, the natural environment, and the future of UK farming. The new NAP is a unique opportunity to set us on a path to a more sustainable and healthy future.
• Ambitious national pesticide reduction targets which are aimed at decreasing both the amount of pesticides used and their toxicity (or “toxic load”). • Increased support for pesticide users (particularly farmers) to help them adopt nature-based Integrated Pest Management (IPM) which is broadly defined as a ‘pesticides as a last resort’ approach. This package of support must include financial subsidies (including via the Environmental Land Management Scheme) and access to independent advice and research on nonchemical alternatives.
And with such high interest and support from the public and civil society, the Government now has the backing it needs to produce a strong final NAP which can deliver on its promise to “leave our environment in a better state than we found it”. On the flipside, a weak NAP which allows pesticide-related harms to continue unabated will doom the Government’s environmental aspirations to failure.
Read the full submission sent to Government online here.
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'BEE-SAFE' HERBICIDES FOUND TO BE HIGHLY HAZARDOUS TO BEES By Edward Straw, Royal Holloway University of London A study by Royal Holloway University of London found that several Roundup® products on sale to consumers and farmers are capable of causing high levels of mortality when sprayed directly onto bumblebees. Importantly, the controversial active ingredient glyphosate was found not to be the cause of this mortality, but rather responsibility for bee-death lies with the product’s co-formulants (poorlystudied ingredients in pesticides). Herbicide products can be applied directly onto flowering weeds or crops (such as glyphosate resistant soy) regardless of whether bees are foraging on them and potentially exposing them to a direct spray. The research team did not attempt to replicate real spraying conditions, but instead tested if these supposedly harmless substances could cause mortality in bees by spraying bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) in plastic boxes with herbicides from a spray bottle.
The cause of the mortality is thought to be the surfactants, chemicals that reduce surface tension to help pesticides penetrate plants, functioning much like dish soap. It is postulated that the surfactants smother the bees breathing holes, called spiracles, essentially drowning them. Bees sprayed with these products have matted down hairs that appear heavily gelled together. The longer-term effects on bees who survived exposure are not known and warrant further study.
The consumer product Roundup® Ready-to-Use and the agricultural product Roundup® ProActive caused 94% and 30% mortality respectively over 24 hours.
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Another consumer product, Weedol, with an equal concentration of glyphosate did not cause any significant mortality. This demonstrates that the mortality observed from the Roundup® products is caused by the co-formulants and not the active ingredient, glyphosate. Worth noting is the fact that Monsanto sell a ‘green’ alternative product, Roundup® No Glyphosate, which is essentially a home remedy of vinegar (acetic acid) and dish soap (surfactants). This caused 96% mortality to bees over 24 hours, demonstrating that attempts to be more environmentally friendly need to be rigorously tested if they are not to be counterproductive. Lead author, Edward Straw, says “Our research highlights that pesticide regulation is overly focused on active ingredients and is ignoring potential damage from coformulants. We demonstrated that some glyphosate-based herbicides can cause near complete mortality, while others are essentially harmless to bees. This means that pesticide companies may be able to re-formulate their products to be much safer for bees with little cost. Unfortunately, because they are herbicides, regulators don’t consider them much of a threat to
bees so these products pass through risk assessment with very little scrutiny in this regard. “Co-formulants aren’t limited to herbicides and are included in almost all pesticide products. So, while the exposure bees face to herbicides may be small as they’re not commonly sprayed on flowering crops (excluding herbicide resistant crops), other pesticide classes, like fungicides, are. More research is needed to identify whether the effects observed from herbicides are replicated in other products. We struggled to identify the specific chemicals responsible for mortality as current legislation allow pesticide manufacturers to keep the composition of pesticide products a ‘trade secret’. If the label was required to list all of a product’s ingredients, researchers would find it easier to identify and highlight potential issues to wildlife and human health. The EU has made recent progress on this issue, banning many co-formulants toxic to human health. This legislation is very weak on the effects of coformulants on wildlife and includes self-acknowledged loopholes like the use of adjuvants.”
Edward Straw is a PhD Candidate at Royal Holloway University of London working with Professor Mark Brown. He studies the impacts of pesticides and parasites on bumble bee health, with a special focus on how lesser studied agrochemicals affect bees. Twitter: @edstrawbio
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NEW BOOK: THE MONSANTO PAPERS BY CAREY GILLAM PAN UK interviewed journalist Carey Gillam, author of the new book The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice.
his lawyers could actually win at trial against Monsanto. But people around the world wanted to see the evidence, and the case ended up being covered by media from around the world.
Your new book is described by one reviewer as “a powerful story, well told, and a remarkable work of investigative journalism…. about one of the most important legal battles of our time.” Can you give us a short summary of what it’s about?
Who is this book written for?
The Monsanto Papers takes readers into the personal and painful struggle of Lee Johnson—an average middle-aged husband and father—as he sees his life unravel due to his terminal cancer diagnosis and tries to prepare his wife and two children for his death. The book also explores the fascinating—and controversial—tactics of the mass tort attorneys who decide to help Lee, and thousands of others like him, take Monsanto to court.
This book is written for all those who need and want to know more about the secrets kept by companies peddling dangerous products. It’s also written for those who suffer from cancers and other diseases caused by products and substances we’ve been told are safe, but which we belatedly learn are not safe at all.
Why was Lee Johnson’s trial against Monsanto such a landmark case? Lee became the first person in the world to go to trial against Monsanto and to prove that the company’s 40-year-old, wildly popular weed killer causes a type of cancer called nonHodgkin lymphoma. Though many scientists for years had pointed to evidence tying Monsanto’s herbicide to cancer, the company had always been successful in convincing regulators and customers that such evidence was invalid. Few onlookers thought Lee and
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The book has a lot of rather surprising twists and dramatic moments. In one chapter the book describes Lee’s lawyers leaking internal Monsanto documents to a journalist, and that journalist was you. Monsanto was furious. Did you have any concerns about that? I had no concerns about publishing the documents at all. Corporations peddling products to millions of people around the world have a moral obligation to be truthful about the safety of those products, and I knew the internal company records would help people see long-hidden truths. Your reporting is based on more than 80,000 pages of court exhibits and other documents and long discussions with Lee and his lawyers, jurors, witnesses and others. What do you think is the most shocking evidence uncovered by Lee’s lawyers? The secrets that came to light when Monsanto had to turn over its internal emails to Lee’s lawyers were all really stunning. There was a company plot to kill a government toxicity review of Roundup products; secret strategies to discredit independent scientists who tried to warn people about the dangers
of the Roundup products; and revelations about how much influence Monsanto had over regulators – and of course, the fact that all this went on for decades made it so much more damning. What is the message you most want to convey to readers of The Monsanto Papers? I hope readers are moved by Lee’s personal journey and motivated to understand that this story of one man and one company is really just one example of a pressing need for greater protection of public health from the dangers of powerful corporations that put profits before people. What is happening with the Roundup litigation now? Monsanto owner Bayer AG is now attempting to resolve more than 100,000 cases by paying out over $11 billion in settlements, but many thousands of plaintiffs continue to try to press forward with their claims that Monsanto’s weedkillers causes their cancers. Find out more about Carey Gillam's book at: https://islandpress.org/books/ monsanto-papers
Carey Gillam is a veteran investigative journalist with more than 25 years of experience, including 17 years as a senior correspondent for Reuters international news service. She is the author of “Whitewash- The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer and the Corruption of Science,” an expose of corporate corruption in agriculture. The book won the coveted Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists in 2018. Gillam is currently Research Director for the non-profit US Right to Know and writes news stories for The Guardian. Twitter @careygillam
www.pan-uk.org | 23
CROSS-PARTY SUPPORT FOR A PESTICIDE-FREE LONDON The result of the London Mayoral election has finally been decided and Sadiq Khan will be in power for another four years. At the London Mayoral Environment Hustings prior to the election, all political parties in attendance stated that they were committed to working towards phasing out the use of pesticides across the capital if elected. The hustings included representatives from Labour, the Conservatives, Greens, Liberal Democrat and UKIP. PAN UK submitted the following question in advance; “London continues to use toxic pesticides to manage weeds across its public spaces. These chemicals have been linked to an array of human health problems, and further deplete our local biodiversity. If elected, will you commit to supporting all London Boroughs to phase-out urban pesticides and adopt alternative weed management plans?” In response, each candidate replied to say that they would work to phase out pesticides in the Greater London area,
support London Boroughs to do so and draw in other key land managers from across the city to work with them. Two of the parties, Green and Conservative, highlighted that a pesticide phase-out was already a promise in their manifestos, while Labour mentioned that they had already taken some action to tackling pesticides during their previous four years at City Hall, and would continue to do so if re-elected. Crucially, all parties stated that eliminating pesticide use was a vital step in meeting challenges linked to climate, nature restoration and the health and well-being of people using London’s green spaces. It was in fact the only issue that the panel agreed on unanimously. Given that a Motion to tackle London’s pesticide use was passed unanimously by the Greater London Assembly (GLA) in June 2019, Londoners are now looking to Mayor Sadiq Khan to make good on this promise. PAN UK will continue to support concerned residents from across the city to push for change.
Pesticide Action Network UK
ISSN 2514-5770
We are the only UK charity focused solely on tackling the problems caused by pesticides and promoting safe and sustainable alternatives in agriculture, urban areas, homes and gardens.
The Brighthelm Centre North Road Brighton BN1 1YD
We work tirelessly to apply pressure to governments, regulators, policy makers, industry and retailers to reduce the impacts of harmful pesticides to both human health and the environment.
Telephone: 01273 964230 Email: admin@pan-uk.org
Find out more about our work at: www.pan-uk.org