Pesticides deemed too toxic for Europe are still being produced here and sold abroad to be sprayed on fields where farm workers live, work, and raise their children – but these are also fields that help feed Europe. What is the human cost behind Europe’s toxic trade in banned pesticides? And, as the EU looks at ways to realign its trade standards, why does it continue to put profit over people? To uncork this double standard, ARC2020’s Natasha Foote reports from the ground in South Africa.
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“What have we done? What have we done?” a chorus of powerful voices chants from the corner of the conference centre. Moving in a procession, signs hang around the women’s necks bearing words like ‘Dormex’, ‘Paraquat’ and ‘Terbufos’. Hoisted on their shoulders is a cardboard box, shaped like a coffin.
These names might not be familiar to you, but they are all too familiar to the South African farm workers carrying them. All are pesticides deemed too dangerous for Europe, yet all are routinely used in the country’s world-renowned vineyards.
The “we” here could mean many things. It could be the South African government, who continue to turn a blind eye to labour violations on farms. It could be the wealthy landowner ‘boers’ (farmers) who continue to force farm workers to use these chemicals on their land, often without protective gear. It could be the farm workers themselves, often unaware and uninformed of the risks that these substances carry.
But “we” could equally be us in Europe, where many of these toxic pesticides come from.
Because it is European companies that produce and profit from these banned chemicals, which are sold beyond Europe’s borders. EU authorities then allow the food – or, in South Africa’s case, wine – to be imported back to Europe’s supermarket shelves.
The impact is as chilling as the timbre of the farm worker’s voices, because it is these women and their families who bear the consequences of this toxic trade.
Now, they are fighting back with a clear message for both their own government and for those beyond their borders – enough is enough.
And this is how, on a rainy March day gathered in the heart of South Africa’s wine region, a group of farm workers, activists, researchers gathered together for a so-called People’s Tribunal on Agrotoxins.
While not a formal court, these community-led tribunals provide a space for those impacted to share their testimonies in front of expert judges to consider allegations of international law violations, including environmental and human rights.
On the backdrop of complex layers of its colonial past, it is these farm workers that are some of the most marginalised in South African society. Women farm workers fall lowest in the pecking order but are also some of the most biologically susceptible to pesticide poisoning, associated with hormonal disruptions and reproductive toxicity.
While South Africa does have labour laws offering some protection, these are poorly enforced. In reality, farm workers are at the mercy of the white, wealthy landowners – the boer farmers.
Even now, 30 years since democracy was declared, power and wealth divides run deep in rural South Africa. According to the Women on Farms project (WFP), an NGO which defends and empowers women farm workers, more than 70% of agricultural land is still owned by the boers, while farm workers are mostly landless, on precarious employment contracts tied to their housing contracts, and earning low wages.
Profit over people
One of the first to testify was Dina Ndelini, who spent most of her life in and around vineyards, working as a farm worker sorting grapes for more than 40 years. Her career was cut short suddenly due to lung damage after exposure to a chemical concoction that has become a dreaded word among South African farm workers – Dormex, commonly used as a plant growth regulator in South Africa.
Its active ingredient, cyanamide, has been described as highly dangerous by the EU Chemicals Agency (ECHA) and comes with a long list of health warnings, including carcinogenicity and reproductive toxicity. It has been banned in the EU since 2009.
Yet it is a best-seller for German manufacturer AlzChem, which describes itself as a “globally active specialty chemicals company” offering answers to such global challenges as “climate change, population growth and increasing life expectancy”.
The company argues the growth regulator is “necessary in climatic regions where mild winters prevail and cold hours are lacking” as it “leads to a considerable increase in yields” of grapes which are then packed and processed by South Africa’s export-oriented farms. Destination: Europe.
In 2022, the Heinrich Boell Foundation investigated exports of pesticide active ingredients from Germany to non-European countries, finding that around 4 tonnes of cyanamide were exported from Germany – more than any other active ingredient that is banned in the EU.
![[Exports of banned active substances from Germany to countries outside the EU in 2021. Source: Heinrich Boell Foundation Report, 2022]](https://www.arc2020.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Exporte-reiner-verbotener-Wirkstoffe.png)
Dina’s is just one story among many shared at the tribunal, while Dormex just one of a long list mentioned by farm workers. Some 192 highly hazardous pesticides are still legally in use in South Africa, 57 of which are banned for use in the EU. Some are neurotoxic or cancer-causing, while others are considered acutely toxic for the environment.
Yet these pesticides are routinely used in South Africa’s vineyards, the impacts of which were laid out one testimony at a time. From ovarian cancer, to lung damage, to visual impairment, farm workers took to the stand to share their stories of the impact on their lives and those of their families.
Some banned agricultural pesticides, poorly controlled by authorities, have even found their way into people’s homes and food supply, in one case resulting in the deaths of six children who accidentally ingested the fatal pesticide, Terbufos.
And these pesticides are mostly used with no personal protective equipment (PPE), as another farm worker, Mekie Piet explained. “On [the farm], there are no safety provisions at all – no masks, protective clothing, gloves, googles – nothing”.
In efforts to protect her husband, Mekie bought him a yellow rain jacket and gloves to work in, which she says gradually “turned white from the pesticide spray”. Those that could not afford their own protection brought “t-shirts or scarves to cover [their] face,” she added – a common story heard from workers at the tribunal.
Mekie’s husband paid the ultimate price for this exposure, losing his life to stomach cancer which his doctors say was most likely caused by pesticide poisoning. The boer served Mekie an eviction notice as her husband was dying. Grief-stricken and struggling financially, her daughter dropped out of school to become a seasonal worker on the farm.
‘Export wine is export poison’
But the problem goes far beyond South Africa. Globally, it is estimated that some 385 million people fall ill every year from pesticide poisoning, while the total number of fatalities around the world from unintended pesticide poisonings is estimated at around 11,000 annually.
Meanwhile, according to the International Pesticide Standard Alliance (IPSA), an global organisation spanning five continents which is working towards a new international regulatory framework for pesticides, pesticide use and production have been steadily increasing worldwide. The global pesticide market was worth approximately nearly €53 billion in 2020, with one-third of this market controlled by companies based in the EU.
South Africa’s farm workers are all too aware of the origins of the pesticides that are making them sick. Plastered around the conference hall are posters that call out Europe’s ‘hypocrisy’. “Stop Germany’s double standards” one poster reads, while another reads “export wine is export poison”.
The tribunal comes just as the EU looks at ways to better align its trade standards. “To uphold the EU’s moral values in response to societal demand, the Commission will pursue, in line with international rules, a stronger alignment of production standards applied to imported products, notably on pesticides and animal welfare,” the EU’s freshly published roadmap for agrifood policy promises.
As part of these efforts, the Commission will establish a principle that the “most hazardous pesticides banned in the EU for health and environmental reasons are not allowed back to the EU through imported products”.
But the focus here is on imported products, rather than stemming the source of the problem – the pesticides themselves.
This is despite the fact that experts agree halting the export of these chemicals would not violate international trade rules.
“An EU-wide ban would be technically possible, provided it’s based on evidence and a legitimate concern for health and safety or for protection of the environment,” top trade expert John Clarke, former director for international relations at the European Commission and former head of the EU Delegation to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva, explained on a recent podcast.
This is because export bans are not embargoes, i.e. trade sanctions taken either individually or collectively and targeting a specific country, as a 2023 legal opinion on the feasibility of such a ban explained.
The opinion, written by top expert in international dispute settlement and WTO law Andrea Hamann, concluded that WTO law “leaves sufficient margin for the EU to effectively adopt an export ban on chemicals already prohibited in the EU”.
So why is this allowed to happen?
This suggests that what is lacking is political will – and, with the EU shipping out hundreds of thousands of hazardous chemicals each year, it is not difficult to speculate why that might be.
Some common arguments include the idea that growing conditions necessitate the use of different chemicals, including from pesticide lobby CropLife. “The production realities of South African agriculture are vastly different,” it said in response to the tribunal, maintaining that different crops, pests and climatic conditions require “different solutions and pesticides at different times”.
But the argument does not fly for Kara MacKay, campaigns coordinator for the WFP. “Substances that are harmful to the health of Europeans, are just as harmful to Africans. To argue any differently reveals a racist and colonial thinking that is unjustifiable,” she points out.
Another commonly heard defence is that the EU deciding on behalf of other countries reflects a continuation of colonial thinking. But others argue that there is no clearer echo of colonialism than the ongoing exploitation to satisfy Europe’s thirst for wine.
“This is a blatant double standard – a practice that reproduces long-standing racist and colonial patterns of exploitation,” UN Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights, Dr Marcos Orellana, argued at the tribunal.
The UN rapporteur added that economic interests cannot be a reason for inaction, adding that the “immortality of this argument is too obvious to need further elaboration”. “Industrialised countries have responsibilities,” he said, adding that “real leadership must confront the economic costs of doing the right thing”.
There is also the argument that third countries are already protected by international agreements, such as the Rotterdam convention, which is designed to encourage information sharing between countries for dangerous chemicals.
But the convention is clunky and unfit for purpose, according to experts. “By the time a pesticide gets listed, they are often obsolete,” Dr Andrea Rother, head of the environmental health division at the University of Cape Town, said, adding that the convention is “more of a ‘tickbox’ exercise” than a true safeguard mechanism.
‘A person is a person only through other people’
These words, drawn from an old African proverb, were chosen to open the tribunal. They speak to our shared humanity and the collective responsibility we hold to protect each other’s dignity—across borders, cultures, and continents.
As the WFP’s Kara Mackay puts it, each day the EU allows the production and export of chemicals banned within its own borders to countries like South Africa, it remains “complicit in the daily pesticide poisoning of farm workers and dwellers.”
The tribunal closed with another powerful African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
The EU now faces a choice: to press forward alone, or to stand in solidarity with farm workers—moving together toward a fairer, more just food system rooted in the fields that feed the world.
This article is produced in cooperation with the
Heinrich Böll Stiftung European Union.
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