Exportações de pesticidas proibidos na UE aumentam “drasticamente” nos últimos anos

 

No ano passado, empresas de químicos da União Europeia (UE) emitiram planos para exportar pesticidas que, no total, contêm 75 diferentes substâncias cujo uso está proibido no bloco por serem consideradas tóxicas.

A revelação é feita num relatório divulgado pela Unearthed, o grupo de investigação da Greenpeace, e pela organização Public Eye. De acordo com as informações, a exportação de pesticidas banidas na UE aumentou “drasticamente” nos últimos anos, apesar de promessas da Comissão para pôr termo a essa prática.

Com base em documentos obtidos ao abrigo de legislação de direito ao acesso à informação, as organizações apontam que a quantidade de pesticidas planeados para exportação a partir da UE para países terceiros aumentou de 81.600 toneladas em 2018 para 122 mil toneladas em 2024.

De acordo com a Unearthed e a Public Eye, o aumento aconteceu porque “nos últimos sete anos a UE baniu dezenas de pesticidas que antes tinham autorização para serem usados nas quintas europeias”, depois de os seus componentes químicos terem sido associados a problemas de saúde humana e do ambiente. No entanto, continuam, “até agora, não aplicou quaisquer restrições às empresas que continuam a produzir e a exportar esses químicos para países com regulamentos mais fracos”.

Em 2020, a Comissão adotara uma nova estratégia sobre químicos (a “EU Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability”), no âmbito da qual se comprometia a “liderar pelo exemplo” ao “promover uma abordagem coerente que pretende que substâncias perigosas que estão proibidas na UE não são produzidas para exportação”. Contudo, a Unearthed e a Public Eye dizem que ainda não foram apresentadas propostas para fazer essas alterações prometidas.

A investigação revela que a maioria (58%) dos pesticidas exportados tinham como destino países de médios e baixos rendimentos, e aponta que, apesar de alguns Estados-membros terem já adotado, por iniciativa própria, leis que proíbem a exportação desses produtos perigosos, o impacto será “limitado” a menos que haja uma proibição de amplitude regional.

Citado no relatório, Marcos Orellana, relator especial das Nações Unidas para assuntos de produtos tóxicos e direito humanos, disse às organizações que as exportações de pesticidas banidos na UE são uma “violação flagrante” dos direitos das pessoas nos países de destino à saúde e a uma vida condigna. O especialista apontou ainda a existência de “duplos critérios”, que classifica como “uma forma de exploração nos campos do Sul Global”.

Fonte da Comissão terá dito aos autores deste relatório que o executivo comunitário está ciente das exportações para países terceiros e que está a trabalhar no sentido “assegurar que os químicos mais perigosos banidos na UE não podem ser produzidos para exportação”.

Data: 23-09-2025

Fontes/Links:

https://greensavers.sapo.pt/exportacoes-de-pesticidas-proibidos-na-ue-aumentam-drasticamente-nos-ultimos-anos-revela-investigacao/

https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2025/09/23/eu-banned-pesticide-trade-expands-despite-promises/

Regenerative Agriculture

A revolution is sweeping Europe’s farms: can it save agriculture?

By April Reese

Momentum is building for regenerative agriculture, a set of approaches that could help farms to weather the changing climate and make them more profitable.

 

At first glance, Ruben Jorge’s farm near the village of Penha Garcia in eastern Portugal doesn’t seem all that unusual. But look closer, and signs emerge that Jorge is shedding tradition in the hope of future-proofing his farm.

Between the rows of chestnut and pistachio saplings, a mix of grasses covers the ground where a stretch of bare dirt would typically be — a deliberate attempt to prevent erosion. To retain water, Jorge has wrapped a blanket of wood chips around the base of each sapling. And among the young trees grow yellow lupin flowers, known as tremocilha in Portuguese, that have a special power: they capture nitrogen and store it underground.

“It’s a natural fertilizer,” Jorge says, looking out over the field of chest-high saplings under an intense springtime Sun. The flowers, mowing and mulch are part of Jorge’s transition to regenerative agriculture, a method of farming that prioritizes soil health, boosts biodiversity, minimizes tilling and uses pesticides sparingly. “Anything that we can do that adds resilience to the land, that preserves this land for the future, is always a better option,” Jorge says, “as long as it’s economically viable, of course.”

The future is coming hard at Europe — the fastest-warming continent on the planet since the 1980s1. In just the past few years, farmers on the Iberian Peninsula have struggled with shrivelled crops, shrinking water supplies and more-frequent wildfires. Going forwards, the economic hit to the European Union and the United Kingdom from drought alone could reach more than €65 billion (US$76 billion) each year by 2100, in part because of crop damage and lost water supplies2.

With an estimated 4 °C of warming expected over the next 75 years if no action is taken to curb or adapt to climate change, southern and western Europe could lose 10% of its agricultural economic output2. Meanwhile, widespread erosion continues to sweep away soil, taking with it crucial nutrients and increasing the risk of flooding and landslides. Between 60% and 70% of soils in the EU are degraded, according to the European Commission.

These mounting risks are leading farmers such as Jorge to bet on regenerative agriculture. Together with climate advocates and scientists, they increasingly see these practices as key to withstanding changing climatic conditions — and to helping farmers stay in business. And Europe is showing how it can be done, they say.

“We believe right now we’re at a point where the grassroots are spreading,” says Simon Krämer, executive director at the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA), a farmer-led advocacy group in Berlin that was founded in 2023. According to Krämer, about 2% of farms in Europe are fully regenerative, and another 5–10% are on the regenerative path.

This budding regenerative revolution now faces some headwinds, however. After farmer protests across Europe in 2023 and 2024, the EU has backed away from some environmental requirements for the agricultural sector, and farmers say that incentives fall short of what’s needed to help them make the transition.

But many advocates expect that the momentum behind regenerative agriculture will continue to build, particularly given Europe’s need to meet its commitments to restore ecosystems and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. And farmers and researchers around the world are carefully watching Europe’s attempts to pull off one of the biggest transitions in agriculture in generations. Regenerative agriculture, Krämer says, “is the most important farmer and science movement in the world”.

Saving the soil

In Portugal and many other parts of the globe, farmers are coming to realize that what worked for their parents and grandparents is no longer viable. To survive increasingly harsh conditions, they need to rethink how they farm – from the soil up.

About 180 kilometres south of Jorge’s farm, just outside the tiny cobblestoned hamlet of Assumar, Herberto Brunk is undertaking his own regenerative experiment. As he manoeuvres his black Peugeot truck up his long dirt driveway, he stops between two of his fields. On the left, Brunk has planted mixed grasses as ground cover. On the right is a thriving field dominated by buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) with some millet, pumpkin and sunflowers mixed in. A few months later, after a dry summer, he decided not to harvest the buckwheat and to leave it as a cover crop instead. Kept intact, it has helped to prevent nitrogen from leaching out of the soil.

Much of the work Brunk is doing is aimed at improving the soil — the foundation for a healthy bottom line. “Our main goal is to actually recover the soil, get our organic matter up, get our nutrients recycled and reduce as much as possible the erosion,” Brunk says. He’s already beginning to see some positive results: “At the moment, we don’t have any erosion at all due to water.”

And Brunk says his farm is likely to be more resilient during wildfires. In August, as fires burnt across Portugal, he helped his neighbour, a cattle grower, to put out a fire. If it had reached Brunk’s property, he says, it probably wouldn’t have done much damage because the fields are green and well hydrated.

This is year three of Brunk’s five-year plan, and he doesn’t expect to see a profit for a while. But both Jorge and Brunk are hopeful that the eventual pay-off will be worth the wait. For them, the regenerative approach is not only a way to restore the soil — it’s also good for business in the long run.

Improving the soil will help to retain water, protecting it from drought, says Brunk. He has also seen the amount of carbon in his soils increase from 1.9% in 2019 to 3.5% in 2024 — more than halfway to his goal of 6%. Under a new partnership with Terra Madre, a company based in Porto, Portugal, that helps farmers transition to regenerative agriculture, he will receive payments for increasing the amount of carbon stored in plants and the soil; companies buy carbon credits based on this sequestered carbon to offset their pollution.

The practices that Brunk and Jorge are deploying — planting cover crops, rotating crops, reducing tilling, integrating trees — can help to protect their farms against the vagaries of a changing climate, says Thomas Elmqvist, a sustainability scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. He co-wrote a 2022 report from the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council on the state of regenerative agriculture in Europe. “There is fairly strong scientific evidence for the practices having an impact,” he says.

For example, growing different crops on the same field in rotation can boost the number and types of microorganisms in the soil3. And a 2021 meta-analysis4 spanning 85 countries showed that diversifying crops in this way increased the biodiversity of other plants and animals by 24%. Growing a variety of crops brings a host of other benefits: the study also found the practice led to a 51% increase in water quality, a 63% boost in pest and disease control and an 11% spike in soil quality.

and it goes on...

Real the full article here

Date: 9-09-2025

Fontes/Links: 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02812-3

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Maritime pines identified as trees that burnt most in wildfires

Maritime pines identified as trees that burnt most in wildfires

Burnt area of maritime pines “three times greater than area of eucalyptus”

The area of pinheiro-bravo (maritime pines, Latin name: Pinus pinaster) that burnt in the large fires this summer is three times greater than that of eucalyptus – the species habitually blamed for the propagation of forest wildfires.

This conclusion comes from a study made by investigators José M.C. Pereira and Luís Lopes, of CEF (the centre for forestry studies at the Lisbon Superior Institute of Agronomy).

The pair analysed the ‘types of occupation of soils affected by 75 fires that had an area themselves of more than 100 hectares’, explains Correio da Manhã today.

The analysis, up to August 25, cross-referenced maps of burnt areas supplied by EFFIS (the European Forest Fire Information System) with the 2023 land-use cartography.

Said CEF, “the scrublands (bushes etc.) were the areas most affected, followed by forests. The percentage of agricultural land burnt is larger than habitual”.

In all, wildfires this year affected 95,095 hectares of forestry. “Maritime pines (57.2%) burnt three times more than eucalyptus (18.8%),” says the study, stressing that this analysis, like the EFFIS maps, are preliminary, taken in ‘real time’, and could under-estimate the amount of land burnt by as much as 10%.

But what is striking in this first study is the considerable fire risks posed by maritime pines. They were seen as “one of the principal fuels for fire propagation, accelerating the spread of flames even more than eucalyptus” in the terrible fires of 2017. Wikipedia explains too, that ‘controlled eucalyptus plantations’ (in other words, eucalyptus trees planted for/ by the pulping industry) have a much lower flammability risk than ‘wild eucalyptus’.

The page on ‘Pinheiro Bravo’ also explains why Portugal has so many of these trees: “This forest species is of great economic interest and has been widely planted because it provides a large yield of timber, protects against the wind, and, due to its upright and deep root system, acts as a dune stabiliser, as well as allowing the recovery of poor and eroded soils. 

“The wood, which is resinous, light, reddish or reddish-brown, with abundant knots, is durable, heavy and not very flexible, so it is used in furniture, posts, formwork, crates, chipboard, carpentry, shipbuilding, fuel and cellulose. The resin is extracted for use in the paint, varnish and turpentine industries. The bark of the trunk is rich in tannin and is used in leather tanning.

“Currently, pine trees represent about 40% of the forest area, or 1,300,000 hectares throughout the country, either in pure stands or in mixed dominant stands. However, more careful management of pine forests is now required in order to ensure better exploitation yields”. This may need to be amended in future to include “in order to ensure less risks for the propagation of forest fires”.

In the meantime, the minister for the environment and energy, Maria da Graça Carvalho, has been in Trancoso over the weekend (one of the areas worst affected by wildfires through August) to stress the urgency of works to ensure that autumn rains do not precipitate landslides, and that ash and burnt debris do not contaminate water sources.

“APA (the Portuguese Agency for the Environment) is already working in various areas, as is the ICNF (Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Forests)”, she told reporters. I have visited a number of sites over the last week. The burnt area is very large. Our main rivers are at risk, the Douro, the Mondego, tributaries of the Tejo, and so we have to act very rapidly”.

According to a report by Lusa: “The minister admitted that the implementation of interventions may be hampered by a lack of companies, labour and technical support, and that it is therefore necessary to ‘focus on the most urgent ones, which pose the greatest danger, and try everything possible, using all available means, because we want to prevent the ash from reaching the waterways”.

Date: 1-09-2025

Fontes/Links:

https://www.portugalresident.com/maritime-pines-identified-as-trees-that-burnt-most-in-wildfires/

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