‘Ultimate hypocrisy’: UK exported 8,500 tonnes of banned pesticides last year

London: The UK exported 8,500 tonnes of pesticides last year that are banned on British farms because of the dangers they pose to human health and nature, a new investigation by Unearthed and Public Eye has found.

The shipments, described by campaigners as “the ultimate hypocrisy”, included thousands of tonnes of a weedkiller prohibited in the UK because of the high risk it poses to people living near fields where it is sprayed.

They also included enough of the notorious banned bee-killing insecticide thiamethoxam to spray an area bigger than England.

In response to the findings, politicians and experts called on the Labour government to follow the lead of some European countries and take action to stop these exports.

“It’s deeply shocking that UK-based companies are shipping these most dangerous and deadly pesticides overseas where they can do huge harm to people and the environment despite being, rightly, banned here,” said Siân Berry, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavillion.

“And it is beyond belief that this is apparently happening lawfully.”

She added: “Our government cannot continue to permit this kind of exploitation.”

Under British law, when a pesticide is banned, the ban does not extend to its production or export. This leaves companies free to keep manufacturing these products in the UK to be sold in countries with weaker regulations.

By far the main beneficiary of this freedom is a single company: the Swiss-headquartered, Chinese-owned agrochemical giant Syngenta. This multinational was responsible for 98% of the banned pesticides exported from Britain last year, documents obtained under freedom of information laws show.

Farmers in Brazil told Unearthed and Public Eye, a Swiss NGO, how they experienced symptoms including tremors, temporary paralysis, and permanent eye damage after being accidentally exposed to one of those pesticides – the Syngenta-produced weedkiller diquat, which became the UK’s biggest banned pesticide export for the first time last year.

A Syngenta spokesperson said the company’s “high-tech UK production plant is a global centre of excellence” and the company only produces pesticides in a few places around the world to ensure “our compounds meet stringent production standards”.

He added: “Agricultural needs differ globally, and the use of agrochemical products is based on assessment by national governments of the risks and the benefits for use in their own country.” Syngenta’s UK facilities sometimes manufacture products that are “no longer available or needed in a UK domestic context” but which are “deemed required” by “farmers and regulators in the importing country”.

However, Marcos Orellana, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, said the export of banned pesticides to the global south was “a form of modern-day exploitation” with “racialised undertones”.

“It seems that for countries that produce and export banned pesticides, the life and health of people in recipient countries is not as important as their own citizens,” he added.

A UK government spokesperson said: “This government is committed to protecting human health and the environment from the risks posed by chemicals.”

The UK goes “beyond the international standard” for exports of the banned weedkillers paraquat and diquat, by “requiring the explicit consent of the importing country before export can take place”, she added. This enabled “the importing country to make informed decisions about the import of those chemicals and how to handle them safely”.

This regulation was inherited from the EU after Brexit, and requires exporters in most cases to get “prior informed consent” (PIC) from importing countries before they can ship banned chemicals.

Under the PIC regulation, any company that wants to export a banned chemical needs to issue an “export notification” to the destination country. At the end of the year, it has to report to UK regulators confirming the total amount of the chemical that was shipped.

Unearthed and Public Eye obtained these documents from the Health and Safety Executive using freedom of information laws.

They revealed that last year the UK exported pesticides containing 8,489 tonnes of active ingredients that are banned from use on British fields. The total weight of the banned products exported will have been much greater – the active ingredient often makes up less than a quarter of the weight of a shop-ready pesticide.

The shipments went to 18 different countries. Top importers included the US, Brazil, Canada and Mexico. A significant amount also went to the EU – where these pesticides are banned – to be re-exported elsewhere.

Five companies were involved in this trade, but Syngenta was responsible for 8,282 tonnes of the exports – or 98%.

The UK’s top three banned pesticide exports were all Syngenta products.

Within that top three – this investigation reveals for the first time – is the notorious bee-killing insecticide thiamethoxam.

This ‘neonicotinoid’ pesticide was banned from all outdoor use in the UK and EU in 2018 because of the danger it poses to bee colonies. However, the last Conservative government outraged environmentalists by repeatedly granting sugar beet farmers “emergency” authorisations to use it on their crops.

The Labour party criticised these authorisations in opposition, and promised to stop them if elected. “We want to ban bee-killing pesticides that are destroying pollinators, who are such an important part of the ecosystem,” said Steve Reed, who is now environment secretary, weeks before the election. “Birds are dying off, in part because there aren’t insects for them to eat because of the use of these kinds of pesticides.”

Data obtained by Unearthed and Public Eye shows that last year Syngenta exported 374 tonnes of this same banned neonicotinoid from the UK, to countries including Côte d’Ivoire, Ukraine, Taiwan and Morocco.

That would make enough thiamethoxam-based insecticide to spray around 133,000 square kilometres of fields – a landmass greater than England.

HSE documents reveal that in 2024 Syngenta hopes to export even more. According to export notifications issued by the company, it plans to ship insecticides containing more than 1,000 tonnes of thiamethoxam this year. The destinations include Brazil, Russia, and Indonesia, but, as was the case last year, Syngenta plans to ship the vast majority to the EU, from where it will re-exported elsewhere.

“Banning pesticides for use domestically while continuing to manufacture and export them to other countries is the ultimate hypocrisy,” said Josie Cohen, head of policy and campaigns at the group Pesticide Action Network UK.

“If a chemical is deemed too harmful to be used here then it should not be sent around the world to poison farmworkers and wildlife and contaminate water and soil.”

By far the UK’s biggest banned pesticide export in 2023 was diquat, which is manufactured by Syngenta in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

The company exported 5,123 tonnes of this herbicide last year, more than half of which was sent to Brazil. Demand for diquat in Brazil has rocketed in recent years, after the Brazilian government prohibited the use of its close chemical cousin, paraquat.

Brazil banned paraquat – which is also manufactured by Syngenta’s Huddersfield factory – in response to studies linking its use to Parkinson’s disease, the seriousness of accidental paraquat poisonings in the country, and information showing farm workers’ exposure to the weedkiller would exceed safe levels even if they were wearing protective equipment (PPE).

Diquat use in the country has soared since this ban came into force in 2020, going from just 1,400 tonnes the preceding year to 24,000 tonnes by 2022.

However, Unearthed and Public Eye have learned that the Brazilian state of Paraná, which is the country’s biggest diquat user, has also seen a sharp rise in diquat poisonings.

Between 2018 and 2021, the state recorded just one to three cases annually. This rose to six in 2022, and again to nine last year.

‘If it’s dangerous for one population, it will be for the other’: the Brazilian farmers poisoned by a banned pesticide exported from Britain

Marcelo de Souza Furtado, a specialist at the Paraná state health department, has seen the number of reported diquat poisonings rise in recent years. Video: Marcelo Curia / Public Eye / Unearthed

“Those numbers reflect a small parcel of reality,” said Marcelo de Souza Furtado, a specialist at Paraná’s state health department who is responsible for tracking poisonings in the west of the state. “According to the World Health Organisation, for each poisoning registered, there will be 50 missed.”

He added: “We’re worried. If it’s already been banned in other countries, then that already shows that it has a very toxic effect.”

Farmers and farm workers in Paraná who have been accidentally poisoned with diquat told Unearthed and Public Eye that they experienced symptoms including temporary paralysis, stomach pain, and permanent eye damage.

“All the right side of my body was paralysed. I couldn’t feel my foot and my hand. My mouth twisted to the right,” said Valdemar Postanovicz, a small-scale farmer in Paraná who was accidentally exposed to Syngenta’s diquat-based weedkiller Reglone in 2021.

“If it’s banned in one place, it has to be banned for everyone,” he added. “We’re talking about people’s health.”

Diquat was banned in the UK and EU in 2018, with farmers given until early 2020 to use up their stocks. The ban came after the European Food Safety Agency (Efsa) found that it posed a high risk to residents and bystanders near fields where it was used, as well as to birds.

In most cases using diquat was not safe for farm workers, and operator exposure to the chemical would be unacceptably high even for people wearing PPE, Efsa found.

A Syngenta spokesperson said weedkillers such as diquat were “essential tools” for Brazilian farmers practising no-till agriculture, a method of farming without tilling the soil that is thought by some experts to help the land sequester carbon. The weedkiller is also used as a pre-harvest treatment on soy crops, which he said gave farmers the ability to “precisely time harvest” and get “two harvests a year on the same land”.

He added that the company trains hundreds of thousands of people a year in the safe use of Syngenta’s products and this year expected to train “55,000 individuals in Brazil alone”.

Diquat’s new position as the UK’s biggest banned pesticide export was driven in part by a sharp fall in Syngenta’s paraquat exports.

Paraquat has been banned in the UK since 2007 and is blamed by experts for at least tens of thousands of poisoning deaths worldwide. For years, this toxic weedkiller was by far the main banned pesticide exported from Britain.

In both 2020 and 2021, the UK exported more than 10,000 tonnes of paraquat, to 10 different countries. But the following year, exports dropped to less than a quarter of that level.

Likewise, in 2023, Syngenta exported just 2,771 tonnes of paraquat. All of it went to the US, where it is still approved for licensed professional use. Syngenta is facing lawsuits in the US from thousands of agricultural workers who allege that working with the chemical gave them Parkinson’s disease. The company disputes that paraquat causes Parkinson’s, and says its products are safe when used according to instructions.

The fall in UK paraquat exports appears to be driven in part by Brazil’s ban, and in part by Syngenta’s recent decision to stop selling paraquat in countries including South Africa and India.

However, this fall is being offset by a range of pesticides that have been banned more recently, including diquat and thiamethoxam, which are now being exported from the UK.

Last year, the UK exported pesticides containing 10 different banned chemicals. These included fenamidone, banned in 2018 because of concerns about its potential to damage DNA and “high potential for groundwater contamination”.

The pesticide company Gowan exported fungicides containing 47 tonnes of fenamidone to Chile. A company spokesperson said Gowan fully complied with international rules governing the export of chemicals, as well as “all rules relating to environment, health and safety standards”.

They also included another bee-killing neonicotinoid, imidacloprid, shipped to Tunisia by the manufacturer Nufarm, as well as the groundwater-contaminating fungicide chlorothalonil, exported in small quantities by both Syngenta and Nufarm.

A Nufarm spokesperson said all of the company’s products “always meet the regulatory and legal requirements of the countries in which they are manufactured and sold”.

He added: “The PIC Regulation aims to protect human health and the environment by providing developing countries with information on the safe storage, transport, use and disposal of hazardous chemicals. We support this fully transparent reporting requirement and are pleased that it is being properly enforced.”

Like the UK, the EU is a major player in the cross-border trade in banned agrochemicals.

However, over the past four years some EU countries have taken steps to end the practice.

In 2022, France made history by bringing into effect a ban on the export of some banned pesticides.

The following year, Belgium passed a law that will be the second national ban on such exports.

The previous European Commission made a commitment to end the export of all banned chemicals across the EU, and a representative of the new commission has said it will continue this work.

In October this year, six member states publicly backed an EU-wide prohibition on banned chemical exports. “I believe we have a moral and we have an ethical responsibility to protect citizens’ health and the environment, not only in the EU but also outside the union,” said Danish environment minister Magnus Heunicke, according to a report by the website Politico. “No one can justify this. It has to come to an end.”

The UK, however, has never made any commitment to end or restrict its own trade in banned pesticides. “European countries are taking steps to clamp down on this unethical practice while the UK government remains silent, yet another area in which we are falling behind the EU in terms of pesticide standards,” said Josie Cohen of PAN UK.