Brazil’s pesticide policy is being adapted to the interests of the agro-industrial lobby to the detriment of human rights, and the so-called Poison Bill (PL 6,299/2002) would further aggravate this situation, assesses the UN Special Rapporteur. for toxics and human rights, Marcos A. Orellana.
Professor of international environmental legislation at the George Washington University (USA) and consultant to various organizations and United Nations conventions on the subject, he leads the request of nine experts from different areas of the entity for Brazilian senators to reject the project.
Hastily passed in February in the Chamber of Deputies by 301 votes in favor and 150 against, the bill entered the Senate’s agenda and sounded the alarm of civil society organizations and researchers linked to health, science, food and the environment.
The UN experts’ petition claims that the bill represents a “monumental setback” for Brazil in the field of human rights and that its adoption, in addition to weakening government regulations on pesticide use, would expose people of all ages to “potential devastating consequences that hazardous substances pose for health and well-being”.
The text states that, on the contrary, Brazil should follow the guidelines and parameters of most OECD countries, a group of rich nations in which the country has been claiming a vacancy for years.
Today, Brazil allows its food to have pesticide residues even hundreds of times greater than those tolerated in fruits, vegetables and grains in the European Union, for example.
“For coffee and sugar cane, Brazil allows levels ten times higher than the EU; for soybeans, 50 times the EU. For apples and broccoli, 200 times the EU. For lettuce, 600 times”, warns Orellana, citing comparative studies in the sector.
In addition, says the UN special rapporteur, of the ten best-selling pesticides in Brazil in 2020, they are banned in the European Union because of their risks to human health or ecosystems. “The excessive use of these substances interferes with the guarantee of rights to life, health, food and water, among others”, says the lawyer specializing in the environment.
According to Orellana, exposure to dangerous pesticides increases child mortality and causes a wide range of health disorders, such as cancer, infertility and miscarriages, as well as physical malformation of fetuses and deficiencies in their neurological development. It is something that affects farmers, workers, rural communities, indigenous peoples and quilombolas.
An example is glyphosate, the most used pesticide in the country that helped Brazil to become a world leader in grain production.
At the same time that its use disproportionately increased the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of soy producing states in relation to the rest of the country, it also increased infant mortality by 5% in municipalities that receive water from the South and Midwest regions. where the soybean crop predominates. The data was revealed by a study by researchers from Princeton University (USA), Fundação Getulio Vargas and Insper.
“Brazil must ban the use of glyphosate from its territory, as so many other countries did after the World Health Organization pointed to its carcinogenic potential. [de causar câncer]”, says Orellana.
“The country must recognize that the health of its people is its number one priority. Food production and economic growth do not legitimize the foreseeable human rights abuses and violations resulting from the excessive use of pesticides.”
PL 6,299 amends law 7,802, passed in 1989, which deals with, from research to commercialization, registration and inspection of pesticides.
For researcher Larissa Mies Bombardi, a professor in the geography department at USP, there are many points in the project that deserve further discussion.
Among the most problematic, she says, is the amendment of part of Article 3, which prohibits the registration of substances that reveal teratogenic characteristics (which alter embryos and fetuses), carcinogenic or mutagenic (which cause DNA mutation).
“The text proposal inserts the expression ‘substances that cause unacceptable risk’, a term that opens an unavoidable legal loophole because the law itself does not define what is unacceptable and what is not”, she says.
Bombardi also points to the proposal to concentrate the issuance of authorizations for new substances in the Ministry of Agriculture. In the current model, the ministry shares this responsibility with the Ministries of Health, through Anvisa (National Health Surveillance Agency), and of the Environment, through IBAMA (Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources).
The expert also cites changes in the temporary authorizations of substances. The PL, among other measures, automatically grants authorization to substances whose analysis the government is unable to carry out within the stipulated period.
The researcher also mentions the lack of important changes to Brazilian legislation already recommended to the country by the UN itself, such as the end of aerial spraying of pesticides, a practice banned in the European Union since 2009.
Orellana highlights that “the right to live in a non-toxic environment is a substantive element of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, which is protected by the Brazilian Constitution and was recognized by the Human Rights Council in October 2021 in its resolution 48 /13, which Brazil voted in favour”.
In addition to the special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, experts from the UN Working Group on discrimination against women (Melissa Upreti, Dorothy Estrada Tanck, Elizabeth Broderick, Ivana Radači and Meskerem Geset Techane), the special rapporteur on the right to (Michael Fakhri), the special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples (Francisco Cali Tzay) and the independent expert on human rights for older people (Claudia Mahler).
