The world’s five largest agrochemical companies are making billions by selling toxic pesticides posing serious threats to human health or wildlife, a joint investigation by Unearthed and the Swiss NGO Public Eye has revealed.
The first major analysis of the global trade in highly hazardous pesticides also reveals that chemical giants are selling disproportionately more highly-hazardous products to low- and middle-income countries, where regulations are weaker.
Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative unit, and Public Eye obtained $23.3bn of industry data from Phillips McDougall, a leading agribusiness intelligence firm, which details all leading-product sales in the world’s most important pesticide markets in 2018 [1]. This sales data, representing nearly half of the global pesticide market, was analysed using the Pesticide Action Network’s 2019 list of highly hazardous pesticides [2].
According to the analysis, Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, FMC and Corteva – the biggest five members of the powerful pesticide lobby group Croplife International [3] – made over a third (35%) of their income in 2018 selling pesticides that are known or presumed to cause cancer, threaten fertility, or are decimating insect and aquatic wildlife across the world. This equates to about $4.8 billion of the $13.4bn of pesticide sales data obtained for these companies.