PANNA

The Pesticide Action Network North Amercia, PANNA, is the North American branch of the Pesticide Action Network.  PANNA states on its website: “Pesticides are hazardous to human health and the environment, undermine local and global food security and threaten agricultural biodiversity.”  The group promotes ending the use of pesticides, replacing them with “ecologically sound and socially just alternatives.”

The group claims: “Pesticides are hazardous to human health and the environment, create resistant pest populations, contribute to declining crop yields, undermine local and global food security and threaten agricultural biodiversity.”

In reality, farmers are using pesticides in a much more sustainable manner than ever before. Using technology, farmers can use small amounts of pesticides to control weeds, insects and fungus in their crops, ensuring bountiful harvests of high quality crops. Biotechnology continues to bring great advances to lower pesticide use with crops that are resistant to pests and to allow for better weed control. PANNA, however, is also opposed to biotechnology.

Action items on the PANNA website include: no genetically engineered crops in foreign aid; bans on methyl iodide and chlorpyrifos and rolling back corporate involvement in food production. Other corporate targets for PANNA are Dow and Syngenta. By taking away access to needed pest controls, removing innovative companies from agriculture and removing genetically engineered crops from food aid, PANNA’s actions would greatly reduce the amount of food available to world, especially in the area of food aid for poorer countries.

Patrick Moore, cofounder of the environmental group Greenpeace aptly said:

“There’s a misconception that it would be better to go back to more primitive methods of agriculture because chemicals are bad or genetics is bad. This is not true. We need to use the science and technology we have developed in order to feed the world’s population, a growing population. And the more yield we get per acre of land, the less nature has to be destroyed to do that… It’s simple arithmetic. The more people there are, the more forest has to be cleared to feed them, and the only way to offset that is to have more yield per acre.”