Nearly one in every two (46%) of the world’s farmers are being poisoned by pesticides every year, with the highest numbers of cases in southern Asia, south-eastern Asia, and east Africa. These are countries the UK relies on for crops like coffee, vegetables, fruit, rice, and spices.
The figures are from “shocking” research published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health by experts from the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) in Germany, Malaysia, and the US.
Using data on pesticide poisoning from 139 countries, the researchers found that over 400 million of the world’s farmers and farmworkers suffer from acute pesticide poisoning annually. And this total excludes the 84 million children working in global agriculture who “are even more vulnerable” to toxic chemicals than adults, as well as rural families exposed through spray drift and environmental exposure.
