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PANUPS: World Bank Still Pushes Pesticides

Mon, 22 Sep 2003 15:58:07 -0700

 

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P A N U P S

Pesticide Action Network Updates Service

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World Bank Still Pushes Pesticides

September 22, 2003

 

World Bank officials gather this week for the World Bank and International

Monetary Fund's (IMF) annual meetings in Dubai, where they will review loan and

development policies that dramatically affect the wealth and daily life of many

nations of the global South. The strong resistance from Third World nations that

flared at the World Trade Organization meetings in Cancun just two weeks ago may

or may not resurface in Dubai, but as World Bank officials claim their lending

practices will improve the lives of the rural poor and protect the environment,

evidence from the ground tells a far different story.

 

Two recent PANNA reports point to the World Bank's failure to implement its

mandatory policy on pest management and reduce Third World farmers' dependence

on pesticides. In the late 90s, the World Bank designated its pest management

policy and several other environmental and social policies as " Safeguard

Policies, " intended to protect the environment and vulnerable populations from

adverse effects of Bank lending -- the " do no harm " principle. Yet as the PANNA

reports show, in the five years since the Bank's adoption of Operational Policy

4.09 on Pest Management (OP 4.09), the Bank has made little progress in putting

those words into practice.

 

OP 4.09 requires the Bank to support farmers' shift from pesticides towards

ecologically sound alternatives such as integrated pest management (IPM). Field

monitoring and project reviews conducted by PANNA and local partners, however,

found widespread violations of the Bank's pest management policy and identified

a number of projects in which farmers reported pesticide poisonings and deaths

in their communities, as well as wildlife loss and contamination of natural

resources. As Lu Caizhen, monitor of a World Bank project in China noted, " We

say there are two ways to die in China: starve to death or be poisoned to death

by pesticides. "

 

In The Struggle to Reduce Reliance on Pesticides: can community-based monitoring

improve policy compliance? PANNA documents the experiences of non-governmental

organizations (NGOs) in Indonesia, China and Mexico monitoring World Bank

project impacts on their communities and environments, and focusing on pesticide

use and pest management practices.

 

In all three countries, PANNA and our NGO partners found the World Bank projects

were out of compliance with OP 4.09. Rather than helping farmers reduce their

reliance on pesticides, the projects either supplied " technology packages " that

included pesticides or placed no restrictions on the use of World Bank funds to

purchase pesticides. NGOs and community groups in the three countries reviewed

project documents and conducted participatory exercises and interviews with

community members and local officials to evaluate the projects' level of

compliance with OP 4.09. Most reviews revealed an urgent need for project

corrections, and monitors presented project officials with concrete and

realistic recommendations on how to improve project implementation.

 

Lu Caizhen explained, " One of the important things about this monitoring project

was that the World Bank got to hear the voices of the local people. The farmers

told the World Bank officials that they don't like using pesticides, and they

know that pesticides can impact their health and the environment, but they felt

they had no choice. Once the farmers learned what IPM was and that the World

Bank policy requires projects to promote it, they were eager to get IPM

training. "

 

However, the Bank's slow progress in responding to reports of policy violations

led local NGOs to question the Bank's commitment to its own policies. Nila

Ardhianie, lead monitor in Indonesia, commented, " Sometimes it seems like World

Bank officials live in a different world, a world where they cannot see us and

the daily reality that people face. I wonder how they can believe the official

reports [they get from Bank project staff] when serious problems in a project

are so easily covered up. "

 

A second PANNA report reviewed project documents for more than 100 World Bank

projects likely to affect pesticide use, and found that only 9% effectively

employed IPM practices and complied with the Banks own pesticide policies. The

Persistence of Pesticide Dependence: a review of World Bank projects and their

compliance with the World Bank's pest management policy, 1999-2003 found a

number of Bank projects that finance pesticide purchases and yet provide farmers

with no training on their environmental or health hazards or ecological

alternatives. Only 35% of reviewed projects mentioned IPM, but most did not

provide a detailed pest management plan as required by policy. Where IPM plans

were described, these plans typically lacked sufficient depth or resources to

ensure lasting impact or contradicted the project's broader goals of increased

input use.

 

The report blames the World Bank's emphasis on agricultural intensification and

export-oriented production instead of small-scale sustainable agriculture using

few pesticides, fertilizers or external inputs as the central barrier to

adoption of meaningful, ecologically-based IPM in Bank projects. Compounding the

problem is Bank staff's weak understanding of IPM and the requirements of OP

4.09. The Bank's own systems of monitoring, supervision and oversight are still

ineffective and a recently proposed overhaul of its Safeguard Policies could be

a major step back from the Bank's stated commitment to basic social and

environmental protections.

 

A summary of the PANNA report was published in the August 2003 Global Pesticide

Campaigner and the full report will be on the PANNA web site in October, 2003.

The community monitoring report, The Struggle to Reduce Reliance on Pesticides

is now on the PANNA web site.

 

Sources: The Struggle to Reduce Reliance on Pesticides: can community-based

monitoring improve policy compliance, PANNA, June, 2003; The Persistence of

Pesticide Dependence: a review of World Bank projects and their compliance with

the World Bank's pest management policy, 1999-2003 PANNA, October 2003; Global

Pesticide Campaigner, PANNA, August 2003, and April 2001.

 

Contact: PANNA

 

PANUPS is a weekly email news service providing resource guides and reporting on

pesticide issues that don't always get coverage by the mainstream media. It's

produced by Pesticide Action Network North America, a non-profit and

non-governmental organization working to advance sustainable alternatives to

pesticides worldwide.

 

You can join our efforts! We gladly accept donations for our work and all

contributions are tax deductible in the United States. Visit

http://www.panna.org/donate

 

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Email: panna

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