Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific (PANAP)

Objective 1. To strengthen the awareness and capacity of the target groups on the impacts of pesticides to take action on pesticide reduction and alternatives. Community Based Pesticide Action Monitoring (CPAM) training empowered communities to document pesticide related issues and use and engage government officials at various levels using evidence from the ground. These trainings have strengthened grassroots advocacy with farmers especially women farmers, indigenous communities, youth and CSOs. CPAM findings have provided data from the ground on the use and effects of pesticides which are important efforts to inform campaigns and policy advocacy strategies to phase out hazardous pesticides. The regional CPAM trainings guided the local level trainings that supported the active participation of women and men farmers in the pesticide monitoring, exceeding the indicator reaching 6,225 respondents against the target of 4,000 respondents. With the availability of the data from the CPAM findings and documentation, now publicly accessible through CPAM public landing page, the hope is that more researchers, government officials and CSOs will have the opportunity to use the information available. PANAP developed the Irene Fernandez Womens Leadership Training (WLT) module and organized three regional WLT sessions as an initiative to empower rural women. These trainings enhanced women's leadership skills, deepened their understanding of the political dimensions of pesticide use, and strengthened their awareness of their rights, encouraging them to pursue practical and sustainable alternatives in agriculture and community life. To ensure wider accessibility and impact, the WLT module was translated into Vietnamese and Bangla, with selected sections made available in Malayalam and Laotian. Over 2921 women are now involved in knowledge sharing on agroecology and in the campaigns on pesticide reduction. Objective 2. To enhance the biodiversity, health benefits, and economic returns through Agroecology initiatives. Agroecology initiatives promote practices that reduce dependency on agrochemicals and restore ecological balance, soil improvement and fertility and biodiversity. PANAP and partners have continued to train farmers, organise learning exchanges and other initiatives that have led to measurable benefits, including increased farm biodiversity, improved soil health, and better wellbeing. Through farmer trainings at the local level, the establishment of Field Learning Sites, and communityled exchanges, PANAP and partners empower smallholder and indigenous farmers, especially women, to adopt sustainable, climate resilient farming methods that strengthen food security and community wellbeing. Notably, agroecology farms reported increased biodiversity and improved soil carbon levels, demonstrating tangible environmental benefits. Up to 2024, 8531 farmers (6707 women) were trained in agroecology and 66% or 5655 of trained farmers are continuing to practise agroecology. Objective 3. To drive pesticide policies or actions at local, national, regional, and global levels for the phaseout of Highly Hasardous Pesticides (HHP) and the promotion of agroecology. The outreach of the Campaign to Protect Our Children (POC) from Toxic Pesticides, alongside broader youth engagement has deepened public awareness and institutional understanding of the longterm impacts of pesticides. More than 150,000 people with 146 organisations with 37 schools and 19 villages committed to Pesticide Free School. Strategic dissemination of evidence based materials, including briefing papers on HHPs, the need for a global alliance to address HHPs, documentation on how these pesticides are being used in Asia and targeted reports on chlorpyrifos, paraquat, and their alternatives, has supported government officials and has helped equip policymakers in making more informed, progressive reforms on pesticide regulation at the regional and global levels. PANAP has focused on the urgent need to phaseout of HHPs in the global and regional efforts on policy advocacy. PANAP inspired PAN International to support human and fund resources to join the global team in the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM) and Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Convention (BRS) processes. In the SAICM beyond 2020 process, PANAP worked to keep important targets on phase out of HHPs, double standards and on alternatives and agroecology to replace these HHPs in the text for discussion and adoption in the International Conference on Chemicals Management. PAN influenced and convinced government officials and other CSOs to support the targets in the new framework the Global Framework on Chemicals (GFC). These were to phase out HHPs in agriculture effectively prevented all illegal trade and traffic of chemicals and waste notify, regulate or prohibit the export of chemicals they have been prohibited nationally implement policies and programmes to increase support to safer and more sustainable agricultural practices, including agroecology, integrated pest management and the use of nonchemical alternatives, as appropriate. PAN supported the African resolution on HHPs which was adopted in the International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM) 5 and we advocated in The Bonn Declaration a paragraph on 'Enhancing the safe production of food, feed, and fiber by preventing, or where not feasible minimising, the adverse impacts of pesticides on health and the environment. PANAP has been following all the technical committees reviewing pesticides for recommendation for possible inclusion in the Stockholm and Rotterdam Conventions. For this project, our focus was on Chlorpyrifos, a children's brain harming and bee harming pesticides. Briefing papers on chlorpyrifos, fact sheets and letter of appeals on chlorpyrifos were sent to the Asian governments particularly, in partners countries and a broad awareness campaigns were also initiated in many countries during the POC campaign. At the end of this project, the decision of the technical committees was to advance chlorpyrifos for inclusion in the Stockholm and Rotterdam Conventions during the Conference of Parties in 2025. In 2024, the U.N. Environment Assembly (UNEA) sixth session adopted a resolution on HHPs called for action by 2035 to phase out the use of the HHPs. This was the collaborative efforts of PAN including PANAP that discussed with government delegates that this was a needed action and that the African resolution should be supported. It was finally adopted in UNEA and it reinforces the agreement last year of the GFC, and the formation of a Global Alliance on Highly Hazardous Pesticides.

Overarching Objective: Reduce the harm caused by highly hazardous pesticides through policy changes and through the practice of agroecology and thereby improving the health of the environment, the income and health of farmers, agricultural workers and indigenous peoples, with a special focus on women and youth, with the ultimate goal of reducing poverty and inequality. Immediate Objective 1: Strengthening awareness of small-scale farmers, women, men, girls and boys, indigenous peoples and agricultural workers on the health and environmental impacts of pesticides; and increased capacity to take action on pesticide reduction and alternatives to pesticide use. Outcome 1.1 Increased capacity among communities to carry out participatory research and monitoring through community pesticide action monitoring (CPAM), providing important evidence base of the impacts of pesticides. Outcome 1.2 Strengthened women´s and men´s capacity and knowledge on impact of pesticides on ecosystems; and health and awareness raised of the benefits of agroecology. Intermediate Objective 2: Reduced use of pesticides and enhanced biodiversity, health benefits and economic returns through agroecology initiatives. Outcome 2.1 Awareness created of benefits of agroecology, and capacity built among men and women farmers to practice agroecology. Immediate Objective 3: Pesticide policies at local, national, regional and global level support the calls and demands of women and men small holder farmers and workers for progressive bans of highly hazardous pesticides and the promotion of agroecology. Outcome 3.1 Provided relevant scientific evidence and input to decision makers at local, national and regional level to reduce and ban the use of highly hazardous pesticides as well as misuse of pesticides. Outcome 3.2 A regional level platform for CSOs , NGOs, regional networks and scientists is establisehd to exchange knowledge and advocate for agroecology and pesticide reduction and linking up to current regional platforms.