Breaking the Circle of Poison: PAN’s First 25 Years

In response to the book Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World (Food First, 1981) by David Weir and Mark Schapiro, activists and experts from 17 countries gathered in Penang, Malaysia, in May 1982, to strategize how they might work together to halt global pesticide proliferation.

PAN is not a mainstream environmental organization. We were intentionally founded in the Global South, where millions are being hurt by the onslaught of chemically dependent farming. From the get-go, we put scientists together with grassroots environmental justice movements to promote health and equity.

In 2007, Pesticide Action Network is celebrating 25 years of progress toward reducing and eliminating the use of pesticides that damage public health and poison the air, soil, water, domestic animals and wildlife everywhere on our beleaguered planet. We’ve been effective because PAN honors and amplifies the voices of the people most directly harmed by these chemicals. We link the interests of farmers, farmworkers and rural communities with residents in small towns and large cities—all of whom are at risk from exposure to pesticides.

PAN has grown from “a good idea that might work” (as one of the participants in the founding meeting put it) to an effective force for positive global transformation. From our beginning, PAN and PAN North America (PANNA) have functioned as network-based platforms that leverage the efforts and resources of diverse allies on six continents.
PANNA serves as one of five autonomous, regional networks around the world that collectively form PAN International. PAN’s other regional centers are located in Germany, Malaysia and Senegal. In Latin America, coordination is currently shared between groups in Chile and Colombia.

With a growing toolkit of skills, expertise, strategies and collaborative approaches, PAN’s ever-expanding circle of participants and allies has won critical policy changes and reined in dangerous practices by building strong partnerships and working simultaneously on local, regional, national and global fronts. Our joint international campaigns have helped to create new standards, codes and treaties for global solutions.

Prior Informed Consent

PAN was an early manifestation of what some now call the “globalization from below” movement. The 1982 founding meeting in Penang, Malaysia, focused on resisting the corporate globalization of the pesticide trade. It was at this historic meeting that participants devised the concept of “Prior Informed Consent.” PIC would establish a new standard for export and import of hazardous chemicals. Manufacturers had been dumping pesticides in the Global South, regardless of actual need or consequences. The voluntary PIC standard was designed to give importing nations access to information on the regulatory status of highly toxic pesticides and, more importantly, it would give them the right to refuse to accept such imports.

Over the next three years, PAN partners in many countries collaborated in gathering evidence underscoring the need for Prior Informed Consent and presented their findings to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). We lobbied the agency to incorporate PIC within the new International Pesticide Code of Conduct FAO adopted in 1985. When the U.S. and European pesticide manufacturing countries blocked this, PAN -persisted in monitoring the problem and increased its lobbying efforts to strengthen the FAO Code. PAN used the Code as a vehicle for highly leveraged organizing, as well as to build public support around the need for global pesticide reform.

In 1987, the FAO finally adopted PIC within the Code. After a decade of work by PAN and PANNA to help create a formal treaty, Prior Informed Consent became international law with the signing of the Rotterdam Convention (PIC treaty) in 1998. The PIC treaty took full effect in 2004 and has been ratified by 117 countries to date.

Banning the Dirty Dozen

In 1985, PAN launched the International Dirty Dozen Pesticides Campaign to win a global ban on the production and use of 12 classes of pesticides that were identified as being particularly damaging in the Global South. In the late 1980s, PANNA and our partners forced Ciba-Geigy to stop making chlordimeform, a carcinogenic Dirty Dozen pesticide. By 1995, the campaign had helped win a thousand-fold increase in bans and restrictions on these target pesticides in countries around the world.

Over time, the Dirty Dozen campaign contributed to the creation of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs treaty). The POPs treaty requires full global phaseouts of 12 chemicals, seven of which are PAN Dirty Dozen pesticides, including the infamous DDT. The treaty went into force on May 17, 2004 and, to date, has been ratified by 147 countries. Due to continued pressure by PAN and our allies, the parties to the treaty (countries that have ratified it) will soon add an eighth Dirty Dozen pesticide, lindane, to the treaty’s global phaseout list.

PANNA constantly works to expose the concentrated power of corporate chemical, agricultural, and biotech companies, the complicity of governments, and the scale of damages and threats associated with promotion of these dangerous substances and technologies.

Monitoring the World Bank

In the late 1980s, in partnership with PAN Asia and the Pacific, PAN North America began to monitor the pest management practices of the World Bank. What we discovered resulted in a 1996–2002 PANNA-led campaign that forced the Bank to adopt policies promoting least-toxic Integrated Pest Management. NGOs and community groups in China, Indonesia and Mexico were trained by PANNA to monitor and successfully demand changes in agricultural development projects in all three countries. In turn, our credibility in on-the-ground work earned PANNA and several civil society partners a pivotal role in the UN’s International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development. This contentious, four-year process is set to be completed in early 2008.

Acting Globally and Locally

Today, PANNA continues to work in close collaboration with PAN partners around the world to promote food sovereignty and alternatives to pesticides. Our focus remains banning and eliminating the production and use of the worst pesticides, while advancing regulations that are based on the Precautionary Principle, on locally controlled, ecologically-based food systems, and on democratic decision-making.

Since the late 1990s, we have also invested more resources in strengthening North American network power to document problems and force turnarounds in local, state and national policies and practices. For example, we have been building alliances with rural communities in California, Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Oregon, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina and Washington; as well as forming strong, collaborative relationships with partners in Canada and Mexico. Many of these regional groups are using PANNA’s Pesticide Drift Catcher, the air-monitoring instrument that allows concerned citizens to document scientifically the presence of pesticides in the air they breathe.

We are pleased to report that, despite the Bush Administration’s determination to turn back the clock, we are seeing major progress in parts of the U.S. where we have programs and partners. On the immediate horizon, PAN North America is gathering strength to:

• Challenge the vociferous and misguided promotion of DDT to control malaria by working with both Artic-dwelling Indigenous Americans and Africans,
• Convince the U.S. Senate to ratify the POPs treaty,
• Eliminate the pharmaceutical use of lindane (a neurotoxin that is considered too dangerous for use on pets but is still prescribed for children with head lice),
• Eliminate chlorpyrifos and other acutely hazardous organophosphate pesticides, and
• Promote alternatives to dangerous fumigant pesticides.

Over the past 25 years, PANNA has worked hard to develop the expertise, wisdom and power needed to expose powerful corporate interests whose goal is to control the global food system—to hold them accountable and reduce pesticide harm. We will continue to connect the needs, strengths and dreams of people everywhere who are committed to creating socially just, sustainable healthy food systems and a toxic-free future.

Our commitment has never been stronger. We celebrate our strong and skilled new leadership in PAN North America, our growing base of individual members, and our partners and allies around the world who, together, will build on these achievements.

Californians for Pesticide Reform

PAN leverages change through strategic partnerships. PANNA’s most ambitious and successful domestic effort has been waged via Californians for Pesticide Reform (CPR)—a statewide multicultural coalition co-founded in 1996 by PANNA, CalPIRG, California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, Physicians for Social Responsibility–Los Angeles and others. Today CPR has 185 active members ranging from national organizations like NRDC to all-volunteer groups such as Campesinas Unidas in the Central Valley and Parents for a Safe Environment in upscale suburbs.

CPR’s campaigns introduced pioneering urban Integrated Pest Management programs in the Los Angeles School District and San Francisco County. CPR reports—often co-authored by PAN staff—have covered statewide pesticide use, health impacts and chemical-free alternatives, winning the respect of medical professionals, the media, legislators, and regulators. Allying with the California Medical Association, unions, faith groups and the PTA, CPR won the landmark Healthy Schools Act of 2000, requiring parent notification in advance of pesticide application. A 2006 bill extended the Act to private day care facilities. The coalition’s “Healthy Homes” project in Los Angeles enlists lower-income tenants, landlords and authorities to reduce pesticide use in public housing.

CPR’s lead campaign, “Safe Air for Everyone,” focuses on preventing pesticide air pollution, phasing out fumigants, lobbying for regulations demanded by the communities most affected, and advancing safe and sustainable farming systems. CPR director David Chatfield participated in PAN’s 1982 founding meeting in Penang.