'If it's dangerous for one population, it will be for the other': the Brazilian farmers poisoned by a banned pesticide e

When Brazil banned the notorious weedkiller paraquat, farmers switched to diquat, a close chemical cousin. But now diquat – banned in the UK, but still manufactured and exported from here – is causing problems of its own

06h Naira Hofmeister Crispin Dowler Laurent Gaberell

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When one side of his body seized up after working the fields of his small-holding, Valdemar Postanovicz feared he was having a stroke. “All the right side of my body was paralysed. I couldn’t feel my foot and my hand. My mouth twisted to the right,” he says.

In fact, he was experiencing symptoms of acute pesticide poisoning. Postanovicz had accidentally absorbed Reglone, a powerful herbicide based on the chemical diquat, while clearing weeds from his land in an isolated village in southern Brazil, in 2021.

“It was only one time in my life, but I felt so sick that I never used it again,” he tells Unearthed and Public Eye. These days, he weeds his fields of beans and tobacco by hand.

Postanovicz is one of a growing number of farmers who have been poisoned with diquat in Paraná, Brazil’s agricultural heartland and its largest consumer of the herbicide. Since a ban on the notorious weedkiller paraquat took effect in Brazil in 2020, the country’s usage of diquat – a close chemical cousin – has soared. Between 2019 and 2022, annual diquat sales in Brazil rocketed from around 1,400 to 24,000 tonnes – an increase of more than 1,600%.

One popular brand of this weedkiller in Brazil is Reglone, a solution containing 20% diquat that is manufactured in Huddersfield, in the north of England, by the Swiss-headquartered agrochemical giant Syngenta. Diquat has been banned from use on both British and Swiss farms since 2020, after EU experts concluded it posed a ‘high risk’ to people living near fields where it was sprayed. However, British law allows Syngenta to keep making the weedkiller in the UK, for export to countries with weaker regulations.

More:
https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2024/12/08/brazil-farmers-poisoned-banned-pesticide-diquat-syngenta-export-uk/