The Fall 2007 issue of PAN North America Magazine
Pesticide Action Network is celebrating 25 years of progress toward eliminating the use of toxic pesticides that damage public health and poison the planet. This special magazine is as unique as PAN itself—a global collaboration created by activists on six continents with articles in English, Spanish, French and German. The full issue is available here.
Each year, five million tons of pesticides are released into the environment worldwide. The consequences are far-reaching and incalculable.
It was a quarter-century ago that a book called Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World prompted 40 activists from 20 countries to gather in Penang, Malaysia. Their goal: to forge a common strategy to address the international pesticide threat. “We had no idea what was going to happen next,” recalls PAN North America’s Monica Moore, “We just knew we needed to be able to work together at all levels to deal with these global problems.”Anwar Fazal, then-president of the International Organization of Consumers Unions (now Consumers International), was the prime mover behind the workshop that gave birth to PAN. After a series of meetings with the Union of Dutch Scientists, OXFAM/UK and Mondial Alternative in The Hague, it was decided that the meeting would be held in Malaysia to reflect the concerns of people in the Global South. Sahabat Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth/Malaysia), hosted the international conference that lead to the creation of the Pesticide Action Network.
Moore remembers the historic five-day meeting in May 1982 as “exhilarating and emotional.” She recalls a government scientist whose coworkers kept telling him, “Why do you make problems for yourself about pesticides? Just take the money they offer and forget about it.” Tears came to his eyes as he concluded, “Now I’m in a room full of people who don’t think I’m crazy!”
“When we first started, pesticides were not widely seen as a problem,” recalls Sarojeni V. Rengam of PAN Asia & the Pacific. “PAN was instrumental in bringing that information to a wider public. Now, even institutions like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Bank acknowledge that pesticides are a problem.”
PAN was not intended to be a multinational organization; it was a “multinational network and movement” without a headquarters, driven largely from the South, and unusual in that many of the leadership roles were held by women.
PAN provided an early example of “globalization from below,” growing into an effective force for positive change by working directly with the people most harmed by these chemicals—farm owners, farmworkers, small-town residents and city dwellers. Rengam notes that organic farming practices that promote biodiversity have shown unequivocally “that pesticides are not necessary for food production” and Farmer Field Schools have proven so successful in promoting ecological alternatives that Asia’s farmers “have reduced pesticide use by 60–80% without any drop in yields or income.”
Today, PAN’s network embraces more than 600 nongovernmental organizations, institutions and individuals in over 90 countries. Our major components are PAN Africa, PAN Asia & the Pacific, PAN Europe, PAN North America and Red de Acción en Plaguicidas y sus Alternativas (RAP-AL, aka PAN Latin America). These five Regional Centers work together as PAN International to leverage the resources of allies on all six continents. The Regional Centers are currently located in the UK, Senegal, the U.S.
From the beginning, PAN put scientists together with grassroots movements to promote health and equity. Over the years, PAN and its expanding circle of allies have won numerous victories on local, regional, and national fronts while our joint international campaigns have reined-in dangerous practices and helped create new laws and safer standards worldwide. We are particularly concerned that pesticide exposure targets the most vulnerable—including the women and children who are forced to work in fields treated with hazardous chemicals.