Victims of Chemical Companies Share Their Stories

With just a few days until the Permanent People’s Tribunal begins, victims of the six largest pesticide corporations are speaking out about the industry’s widespread human rights violations. 

“Rights to life, health and livelihood are inherent to our humanity,” maintains Kathryn Gilje, co-director of Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). She will be reporting from the trial.

“Pesticide corporations have jeopardized these rights because there is no system of accountability that follows actions across national borders or over the decades it takes to prove guilt. Until we hold them accountable, pesticide corporations will continue to avoid responsibility for their human rights violations,”she adds.

And in the process they continue to poison us slowly and mercilessly.

The six largest pesticide companies – Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, Dow and Dupont (collectively known as the “Big 6”) are being indicted for their human rights violations, including internationally recognized rights to life, livelihood and health, reports PANNA. 

The agrochemical industry is valued at more than $42 billion!! And they operate with impunity while more than 355,000 people die from pesticide poisonings every year, and hundreds of thousands more are made ill. We can turn to environmental indicators such as our honeybees to see how dangerous the sublethal effects of these poisons are!

“The right to care for and work the land is basic and fundamental,” says David Runyon, a 900-acre Indiana farmer. “Monsanto and Co. have undermined my ability to provide for my family and prosper as a farmer. And the Big 6 have overstepped any system of justice and need to be held to account for their activities.”

Runyon will be one of about fifteen witnesses, testifying at the trial in Bangalore, India next week. He and his wife Dawn almost lost the family farm when pesticide and genetic engineering giant Monsanto found contamination of seeds on their property. The company threatened to sue Runyon unless he paid them for genetically modified seeds, seeds that had been carried by the wind from a neighboring farm. We’ve heard this story from countless of farmers throughout North America.

Other victims of human rights violations share their stories on YouTube, including:

 ·       Viola Waghiyi, a Yupik Eskimo and mother from St. Lawrence Island in Alaska. Waghiyi and her community have suffered from the global migration of pesticides that end up in food and contaminate the breast milk of native peoples, threatening their health and way of life.

·       Tom Theobald of Niwot Honey Farms in Colorado loses part of his beekeeping operation every year. He blames the pervasive use of pesticides. Tom is a hero in the bee world. 

·       Juana Cortez, a farmworker from California’s Salinas Valley. Cortez, like many women, suffered reproductive harm, including the miscarriage of a child, due to pesticide exposure.

Attorneys, witnesses and jurors from across the globe head to India to begin an intensive three-day trial, starting on December 3rd. The trial commences on the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, in which over 20,000 people have died, after an explosion at a Dow Chemical facility.

The trial is hosted by the Pesticide Action Network International, a network of over 600 participating nongovernmental organizations, institutions, and individuals in over 90 countries working to replace the use of hazardous pesticides with ecologically sound and socially just alternatives.

The Permanent People’s Tribunal was founded in Italy in 1979 as a people’s court to raise awareness of massive human rights violations in the absence of another international justice system. The PPT draws its authority from the people while remaining rooted in the rigors of a conventional court format. Citing relevant international human rights laws, precedents and documents such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights in its findings, the Tribunal examines and passes judgment on complaints of human rights violations brought by victims and their representative groups.

“Pesticide corporations have gotten away with human rights violations for far too long,” said Paige Tomaselli, staff attorney from the Center for Food Safety, and a prosecutor at the trial. “We will try them in an international court, shining a spotlight on their brazen violations of rights to live, health and livelihood.” 

A summary of the trial, including summaries of cases against the Big 6, can be found at www.panna.org/PPT.  

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