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CAPE evolved as a network in October 2002, when farmers, activist groups, public health professionals, researchers, voluntary organisations came together with many pesticide impacted communities and formed a platform - the Community Action for Pesticide Elimination to take forward the joint struggle to keep our fields, food and lives free from pesticides. It was launched on a workshop on Pesticides and Health orgnanised in Bangaluru.
Pesticides and its impact on the system have become too ominous and threatening in the country and yet little considered when matters of health and environment are discussed. In the last two or three years we have seen that many communities all over the country have realised that they have been enslaved by pesticide use and driven to suicides or have been living contaminated lives. Pesticides as a major source of health crisis came to be seriously recognised with the tragedy in Kasaragod due to Endosulfan spraying, and now we see such poisoning happening in other areas as well. Even while the food safety, the life of the villges and the future of soil and water in the country is being affected, it is quite an irony that the environment and health planning in the country do not consider presitcides and its impact.
CAPE feels that a realistic and better understanding of the impact of pesticides on the helath of the public and the environment need to be researched as well as considered in both planning and implementation. CAPE also recognises farmers were enslaved into technology, chemicals and hybrid seeds in the name of increasing productivity, whicheventually failed the farmer and led them to losses and suicides. Food Soverrignty is a fundamental issue and cannot be achieved with policies that make more and more farmers slaves of MNC's and Pesticide Corporates. Food Safety (from chemicals and manipulated seeds) cannot also be achieved by continuing the policy of poison production and use.
CAPE also believes that it must respond to the changes happening all over the globe. The Rotterdam Convention, the Stockholm Convention, the Basel Convention and the PIC, the Inter-Governmental Forum for Chemical Safety (IFCS) are a few of such international efforts to address public health priorities. In such forums we see that the NGO's and Voluntary Agencies and Independent Research findings are getting more and better spaces and consideration. In India these global efforts are seldom reflected in the policies and decisions.
CAPE believes that much work is needed to achieve the aim of pesticide elimination, with the single goal of ensuring safe food and clean environment.
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