The campaign “Stop Paraquat”, conducted by non-governmental organisations, trade unions, and scientists around the world, calls to end the production and ban the use of the highly toxic and harmful herbicide.

The critics’ main target is the agri-concern and leading distributor of paraquat, Syngenta. The company markets the herbicide in over 100 countries, usually under the brand name ‘Gramoxone’. Paraquat is regularly used on banana, coffee, palm oil, rubber, fruit, or pineapple plantations. Growers large and small use it copiously on their maize and rice fields. Many workers and farmers exposed to paraquat on a regular basis have serious health problems, and deaths caused by the high toxicity of the herbicide, which has no antidote, are not infrequent.

This website contains important information concerning the campaign (links on the right side), as well as many facts about the use of paraquat and various studies on the health problems associated with it (links on the left side).

Read more on the Berne Declaration

A request to all organizations concerned about the Food crisis and which reject the hypocritical hijacking of the crisis to attempt to push through a Doha Round of WTO expansion, to endorse this letter.

Dear All,

We have all seen the cynical appropriation of the devastating food crisis to call for a conclusion to the Doha Round of the WTO, as if increased liberalization of agriculture will help solve crisis rather than being a part of the cause of it!

On our last OWINFS WTO strategy call, we identified this as a key issue, and in our subsequent OWINFS Agriculture Working Group call we decided to organize a sign-on letter about it - the first in a long time specifically on Agriculture.

We therefore request all organizations concerned about the Food crisis and which reject the hypocritical hijacking of the crisis to attempt to push through a Doha Round of WTO expansion that has yet to be able to be concluded on its own "merits", to endorse the attached letter, which is in English, Spanish, and French.

Please send endorsements to Anuradha Mittal at the Oakland Institute, at amittalAToaklandinstitute.org as soon as possible.

• More informations : www.choike.org

We, the undersigned members of African civil society organisations, as well as organisations from other parts of the world, do urgently call for a moratorium on new agrofuel developments on our continent. We need to protect our food security, forests, water, land rights, farmers and indigenous peoples from the aggressive march of agrofuel developments, which are devouring our land and resources at an unbelievable scale and speed.

We call for:

 A moratorium on new agrofuel developments in Africa. Our governments urgently need to stop and think before delivering our continent to the fuel demand of foreign investors.
 No agrofuel targets for Governments in Europe and the rest of the world.
 An international moratorium on agrofuel exports, until the true social and environmental costs can be assessed, and disaster averted.

We have chosen to name this problem “agrofuels” instead of the more common term “biofuels” to make clear that we are talking about the large-scale growing of crops specifically to produce liquid fuels. We are not talking about the use of wood, dung or waste matter. Nor are we talking about small-scale production that is integrated into food production and used for household and local energy supplies. We wish to make clear that the agrofuels push is about large-scale fuel production on massive privatised plantations, driven by the fuel demands of export markets. more

• Please sign on to this Call by sending an email with your name, organisation and country to: agrofuelsafrica@gmail.com