Pesticide Action Network and 430 civil society and indigenous peoples organizations from 69 countries have sent a letter of concern to the 170th session of FAO council about the FAO partnership agreement with CropLife International.
CropLife International is a global trade association whose members are the world's largest agrichemical, pesticide and seed companies: BASF, Bayer Crop Science, Corteva Agriscience, FMC Corporation, Sumitomo Chemical and Syngenta. The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) en CropLife International have started a partnership in 2020 to collaborate on pesticide use. We think that this partnership is incompatible with FAO's obligations to uphold human rights, directly counters any efforts toward progressively banning Highly Hazardous Pesticides, and undercuts the FAO and several Member States' support for agroecology and other transformative practices.
The letter asks the Council to review and end immediately the partnership agreement with CropLife International.
Both ENDS letter to the World Bank on the Environmental and Social Safeguards policies review. The World Bank safeguards review is part of a reorganization that aims at making lending cost-effective with less rules in place, which likely entails an increase in the number of problem projects. The reorganization aims at making lending
more cost-effective, forms in place. Safeguards policies are of crucial importance for project affected people to hold banks to account. However, Environmental and Social Frameworks (ESF) nowadays replace safeguards at banks. The ESF model leads to a reduction of a Bank's direct and mandatory role in overview, including due diligence, monitoring, and evaluation, of Bank funded activities and investments, along with a shift towards a greater reliance on client self-assessment and self-reporting. Our main ask is a return to binding, rules-based safeguards policies at banks.