Pesticide Action Network Aotearoa NZ

Pesticides: Sowing Poisons, Growing Hunger, Reaping Sorrow
By Dr Meriel Watts, addresses the role of pesticides within the industrial complex, and how they have eroded traditional and organic agricultural systems that provided for people’s food needs, causing a shift from production of food to crops for cash.
It addresses the poisoning of people, the contamination of the environment, the advent of insect resistance, and the reduction in the biodiversity that sustains agro-ecosystems.
It explores the greater productivity that can be achieved by avoiding the use of pesticides at the same time as enabling farming communities to regain their dignity and independence.
Working with nature, encouraging biodiversity, ensuring people’s food sovereignty, and using local and indigenous knowledge and local inputs: this is how the world’s people can be fed.
Produced September 2010.

Roundup's Not OK

Dr Meriel Watts reminds us why we use natural forms of weed control in organic systems, rather than toxic, synthetic chemicals, as she systematically dispels the myth that Roundup is a relatively benign herbicide.
Produced November 2009.

Glufosinate-ammonium is a broad-spectrum herbicide.
It carries unacceptable risks to humans, especially to the neurological development of the foetus, to agricultural biodiversity, and to the environment.
Monograph produced October, 2008.

Glyphosate, commonly known by its original trade name Roundup™
(manufactured by Monsanto), is the world’s most widely used herbicide.
Monograph produced November, 2009.

Paraquat is the most highly acutely toxic herbicide to be marketed over the last 60 years.
Yet it is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, and in most countries where it is registered it can be used without restriction. It is used on more than 100 crops in about 100 countries.
Monograph produced February, 2011.