GroundUp reports that about 200 women working in agriculture held a protest march in Paarl on Friday, calling on European company Bayer to stop producing and exporting pesticides to SA.

Scores of pesticide products that are banned from use in the European Union (EU) are being exported to and used in SA. The protesters marched to the head office of Bayer, a German pharmaceutical and biotechnology company. They carried placards that read: “Bayer, your pesticides are deadly” and “End double standards”. The march was organised by the Women on Farms Project (WFP), an organisation working with women farm workers and farm dwellers in the Western Cape. WFP’s Katrina Claasen said they get a lot of complaints from women on the farms about asthma, sinus problems, and skin irritation on their hands after working with crops that had been sprayed with pesticides. WFP director Colette Solomon said after doing research in 2017 the organisation found that many farm workers and dwellers were exposed to pesticides. In 2019, the organisation started focusing on getting the SA government to ban 67 pesticides that were already banned in the EU. In May last year women marched in Worcester calling for this ban. In September 2022, the national Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development announced it would start phasing out certain pesticides and ban them completely by June 2024.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Liezl Human at GroundUp

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