Brazil has approved hundreds of new pesticide products since its far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, took power in January, and more than 1,000 since 2016, a study has found. Many of those approved are banned in Europe.
Of 169 new pesticides sanctioned up to 21 May this year, 78 contain active ingredients classified as highly hazardous by the Pesticide Action Network and 24 contain active ingredients banned in the EU, according to the study published on Wednesday by Greenpeace UK’s news agency Unearthed. Another 28 pesticides not included in the report were approved in the last days of 2018.
“It really appears that they have accelerated their approvals process,” said Prof David Eastmond, a toxicologist at the University of California, Riverside. “Some of these are highly hazardous and this raises concern.”
Brazil began accelerating pesticide approvals in September 2016 after Michel Temer, a conservative politician with close agribusiness links, assumed the presidency. Bolsonaro also won the presidency with strong support from the agribusiness sector.
Since Temer took office, 1,270 pesticides have been approved – double the number in the previous four years. Of those, 193 contained active ingredients banned in the EU, Unearthed found using data from Brazil’s agriculture ministry.
“We have never had such a big release of pesticides. This is certainly a political decision,” said Marina Lacorte, an agriculture and food campaign coordinator at Greenpeace Brasil. “The industry puts profits ahead of the population’s health.”
Concern has spread beyond Brazil. The Swedish natural and organics supermarket chain Paradiset stopped selling Brazilian products last week because of the increase in approvals of pesticides and the threat Bolsonaro represents to the Amazon rainforest. Its founder, Johannes Cullberg, has launched a #BoycottBrazilianFood campaign.
Several foreign companies have had pesticides approved in Brazil that are banned or restricted in their own countries, Unearthed found.
The Chinese chemicals firm Adama has registered 25 products in Brazil since 2016 that contain chemicals it could not use in the EU, including two with acephate. China introduced restrictions on acephate in 2017. “Human and environmental safety … are key commitments for us,” an Adama spokesman told Unearthed.
Hamburg-based Helm has registered nine products in Brazil it could not sell in Germany over the same period, including one containing the weedkiller paraquat, which has been banned in Europe since 2007 and is scheduled to be banned in Brazil by 2020. The company did not respond to questions from Unearthed.
Three Brazilian products containing atrazine have been approved this year. Atrazine has been banned in the EU since 2003 and has been found to chemically castrate frogs. Products containing atrazine are also sold in Brazil by Syngenta, a former Swiss company now owned by ChemChina. The Chinese firm also sells paraquat, which is manufactured in the UK.
Syngenta said: “We manufacture in a few countries to make sure that all our customers benefit from the same high standards, and of course to manage costs. Atrazine and paraquat are registered in many so-called developed countries.”
Brazil’s agriculture minister, Tereza Cristina Dias, told parliament in May that an “ideological process” had hindered previous governments from approving pesticides and defended the use of glyphosate, a controversial weedkiller.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate, which is currently approved for use in the US and EU, as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015. In May, a California court awarded more than $2bn to a couple who said the weedkiller caused their cancer – a claim denied by the manufacturer Bayer, which faces other lawsuits. Brazil has approved 87 products containing glyphosate since September 2016, including eight this year.
A spokeswoman for Brazil’s agriculture ministry said in an email that the ingredients in all pesticides approved this year were already being sold by other companies. It attributed the increase in approvals to more chemically trained staff at the ministry and reorganisation at the regulatory agency Anvisa, which along with the agriculture and environment ministries approves new products.
Before becoming agriculture minister Dias presided over a parliamentary commission last year that approved a controversial bill to lift restrictions on pesticides, dubbed the “poison package” by opponents. The bill has yet to be voted on.
Luiz Cláudio Meirelles, a researcher at the government research institute Fiocruz and the Brazilian Collective Health Association (Abrasco), said Congress should pass a 2016 bill Abrasco helped draft that aims to reduce the use of pesticides and promote natural ingredients.
“If there was investment, if there was focus on this, we would move forward quickly,” he said. “We have a model that is very dependent on pesticides.”