Europe’s poisonous hypocrisy

Abdelmonem Fawzi

Europe routinely condemns proposals like President Donald Trump’s tariff walls and his aggressive remarks about acquiring Greenland, passionately defending international law, economic justice, free trade, European values, and human rights in the process.

However, this moral posturing collapses when the same continent looks towards Africa, exposing a stark pattern of double standards and what can only be described as environmental racism.

For decades, Africa has functioned as the West’s convenient repository for substances and practices no longer tolerated at home.

It should therefore surprise no one that pesticides classified as far too hazardous for European soil, water, and citizens continue to arrive on African farms and enter African food markets.

A powerful 2025 investigation conducted jointly by Unearthed, part of Greenpeace’s journalism unit, and the Swiss organization Public Eye revealed that 44highly hazardous pesticides, all prohibited within the European Union because of grave threats to human health and the environment, are still manufactured in Europe and deliberately shipped for use across the African continent.

During 2024, the EU notified exports of nearly 90,000 tonnes of these dangerous chemicals bound for Africa, contributing to a broader total of almost 122,000 tonnes of banned pesticides exported from the bloc in recent years, a sharp increase, despite the European Commission’s public commitment in 2020 to halt the practice entirely.

These substances earn their bans in Europe through documented dangers: they contaminate groundwater, destroy wildlife, act as carcinogens, disrupt reproduction, or inflict direct harm on those who handle them.

Nevertheless, major producers based predominantly in Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands persist in sending them to more than 25 African countries, among them South Africa, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Morocco, and Tunisia.

The list of exported toxins includes cyanamide, outlawed in the EU almost two decades ago after clear evidence emerged of severe harm to farmworkers; chlorothalonil, phased out by 2020 because it pollutes groundwater and is presumed to cause cancer in humans; epoxiconazole and mancozeb, withdrawn in 2020 and 2021 respectively for damaging fertility and endangering babies in the womb; thiamethoxam, a neonicotinoid lethal to bees that has been barred from outdoor application in the EU since 2018; and 1,3-dichloropropene, a soil fumigant banned since 2007 for similar groundwater and ecological risks, which for years ranked as the single largest banned pesticide shipped to Africa by volume, with thousands of tonnes directed especially towards South Africa, Kenya, and Morocco.

European agrochemical companies justify the ongoing trade almost exclusively through the lens of profit.

They argue that any outright export prohibition would trigger job losses at home, prompt relocation of production facilities to less regulated regions, indirectly damage European agriculture, and potentially drive up black-market pesticide use in importing nations.

Protecting shareholder returns and domestic employment clearly outweighs safeguarding the health of African communities.

The persistence of these chemicals in African agriculture stems from a painful combination of survival pressures, informational voids, and structural dependencies.

Many smallholder farmers remain unaware of the full risks because product labels arrive in languages they cannot read or bury critical warnings behind impenetrable technical terminology.

Surveys in Tanzania, for instance, indicate that more than half of pesticide users store the chemicals inside their living spaces or repurpose the containers for food and water without hesitation, underscoring profound deficiencies in training, advisory services, and regulatory enforcement.

Economic necessity locks farmers further into the cycle. For households that survive season to season on narrow margins, these products are aggressively marketed as inexpensive, immediately available safeguards against total crop failure.

Farmers frequently apply them preventively, treating the chemicals as a form of crop insurance.

Decades of Green Revolution-inspired policies, reinforced by government subsidies, donor-funded credit schemes, and hybrid seed packages that mandate accompanying fertilizers and pesticides, have entrenched this chemical dependence.

Climate disruption, meanwhile, intensifies the reliance. Higher temperatures and unpredictable rainfall patterns provoke more frequent and severe pest outbreaks, while industry advertising relentlessly portrays synthetic pesticides as indispensable tools for maintaining yields in an increasingly hostile environment.

The promise of short-term productivity gains overshadows the accumulating damage.

The consequences radiate outward. Farmers absorb the heaviest exposure while working the fields, facing elevated risks of cancer, neurological disorders, and reproductive harm.

Ordinary consumers ingest residues daily in staple foods, oblivious to the presence of substances Europe deems too dangerous for its own population.

Beyond human health, the toll includes collapsing insect populations, eroded soil fertility, and widespread water pollution.

A particularly sobering illustration emerged from Greece’s Larissa University Hospital in Thessaly, where pulmonologists in the early 2000s noticed an alarming trend among patients who both smoked and handled pesticides: a distinctive and aggressive form of lung scarring.

Their 2006 research, corroborated by parallel studies in France, contributed to the formal recognition of Combined Pulmonary Fibrosis and Emphysema.

As one of the physicians, Dr IliasDimeas, observed, nearly every individual exposed to that dual insult developed this specific, devastating condition.

Africa continues to absorb Europe’s discarded chemical burden, a practice that perpetuates a colonial logic in which certain lives merit lesser protection.

Genuine equity requires the European Union to impose an immediate and total prohibition on the production and export of these highly hazardous pesticides, with no loopholes or delays.

Until that step is taken, Europe’s frequent invocations of international norms and moral superiority will remain profoundly unconvincing.