Status: 02/11/2022 12:47 p.m
Millions of people around the world suffer from accidental poisoning from pesticides. Development Minister Schulze now wants to impose an export ban on dangerous pesticides. Selling them is not an acceptable business model, she said.
The export of dangerous pesticides is about to end. Federal Development Minister Svenja Schulze announced an export ban from Germany to other countries. “We should set a good and credible example in Germany when it comes to protecting nature and health,” she told the Rheinische Post.
Sustainable agriculture in focus
The traffic light coalition has therefore decided to ban the export of pesticides, which are also banned in Germany. Schulze also criticized the approach of pesticide companies to increasingly sell pesticides on the African continent that are banned in the European Union.
It is “not an acceptable business model to make small farmers in developing countries dependent on credit for resistant seeds and the appropriate pesticide,” said the former Federal Environment Minister. In cooperation with partner countries, she also wants to focus on organic farming as a particularly sustainable form of agriculture.
“255 million poisoning accidents”
The Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND) recently called for drastic restrictions on the use of pesticides and an export ban on substances that are already banned in the EU. The amount of pesticides used worldwide has increased by 80 percent since 1990, according to the jointly published “Pesticide Atlas 2022”.
The growing amount of pesticides is leading to an increase in poisoning, especially in Africa and Asia. According to the report, there are around 255 million poisoning accidents per year in Asia, just over 100 million in Africa and around 1.6 million in Europe.