For Nigerian farmer, Prince Manu, using pesticides is the norm, as it is for almost every farmer he knows. He believes pesticides make farming far easier.
However, after his daughter, Beatrice died at the age of 13 from stomach cancer, Manu often wondered whether chemicals used on his farm in Suleja, Niger State, Nigeria, caused her death.
Studies have shown that exposure to various environmental pollutants such as pesticides is associated with increasing frequency of cancers and solid tumours, particularly among individuals with occupational exposure such as agricultural workers.
Nigeria, along with other low and middle income countries, has become a dumping ground for big Europe-based agrochemical companies exporting banned toxic pesticides for profit at the risk of lives and the environment.

READ ALSO: JUNGLE JUICE: How Europe Dumps Its Toxic Fuel in Africa
A COSTLY CHOICE
Like many farmers in Nigeria, Manu ventured into farming to earn extra income. The meagre monthly salary of N36,000 (around $25) he receives from the Ministry of Education as a primary school maths teacher prevented his family of six from affording a decent standard of living.
Although agriculture is the country’s largest employer, there are minimal subsidies for farmers. Hence, local farmers like Manu come to rely on cheaper pesticides, even if they are either toxic or banned.
So, barely two months after his daughter’s death, Manu was back at his agrochemical dealer shop.
Even as Jude George, the dealer, offered his condolences to Manu for his loss, he still handed out a four-litre chemical mixture of paraquat, a toxic chemical primarily used for weed control, which has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, to him.

The chemical has been banned in 13 countries, including Sweden, Denmark, and Austria, since 2003.
“We need these chemicals or will spend more than our gain,” Manu explains.
“Some [farmers] have to mix different ones to ensure they work fast and save money.”
However, this practice “comes at a cost”, according to Ugwu Chinasa, a pure and industrial chemist and scientific officer at the Federal University of Allied Health Science, Enugu State, Nigeria.
“Pesticides have this strong and pungent smell, indicative of how concentrated the components are already,” says Chinasa.
“Without proper protective clothing, long-term inhalation may cause health issues including cancer, according to research.”
According to the Pesticides Action Network, farmers, farm workers, and their families have the highest pesticide exposure, making them more vulnerable to higher cancer rates and other immune-disruptive diseases.
Hauwa Kolo, director of community and family health services at the Niger State Ministry of Primary Healthcare, explains how the probability of exposure and severe health complications are also higher in rural and semi-urban farming communities where “a lot of the farmers use empty pesticide containers to store food produce instead of discarding them”.
Kolo explains that the healthcare sector in Niger state is only beginning to record higher cancer cases due to social and medical awareness.
“In the north, people refer to illnesses like cancer as ‘Daaji, that is something that is unknown and will be exacerbated if modern medicine is used,” she says.
“So, they don’t come to the hospitals and not all cases are recorded.”
Growing social health awareness has resulted in a spike in recorded cases, Kolo believes. She says authorities are leveraging partnerships with non-governmental organisations to educate communities.
“These chemicals are not supposed to be harmful,” she adds.
A POROUS MARKET
The hustle and bustle of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub, only seems to intensify the odious stench of chemicals drifting out from the chemical lane at Ojota Chemical Market, the largest chemical market in the country. Agrochemical dealers like George, Manu’s agrochemical supplier say they source their products from there.
On sale in the chemical market are a wide variety of agrochemical cocktails, including EU-banned toxic pesticides apparently from top European agrochemicals like Syngenta, BASF, and Bayers.
For instance, Syngenta’s Apron Star, which contains Thiamethoxam, an EU-banned active ingredient is on sale, while Gramoxone, a paraquat dichloride-based pesticide and Primextra Gold 660Sc, which contains a banned neuro-disruptive chemical called Atrazine, are available in one—to two-litre canisters.
Topstar, a Bayers-manufactured chemical, containing the EU-banned substances Oxyadiargyl and Ethoxysulfuron are also available in the market.
Between 2018 and 2019, about 722 tonnes of Oxyadiargyl and Ethoxysulfuron chemicals were exported to Nigeria, according to an investigation by the Greenpeace journalism project Unearthed.
A spokesperson for Syngenta claims the company is no longer selling or distributing the products found at the Ojota chemical market and has halted collaborations with distributors of such products.
“Wherever we operate around the world, we do this in full compliance with local laws and regulations,” the spokesperson says.
“Further, in developing countries we only sell products where the active ingredients… have already been approved by an OECD country, or where the regulatory data used for the safety evaluation is of an equivalent standard to OECD requirements.”
In Nigeria, “we have also witnessed established syndicates selling counterfeit products – illegally using our brand,” she adds.
Alexander Hennig, a spokesperson for Bayer states in an email that the company stopped the sale of Topstar in Nigeria in 2021. Hennig adds that all of the ingredients the outfit uses are registered in at least one OECD country.
Henning also highlights that African countries face unique challenges such as “locust plagues” and “Fallarmy worm”, but fail to provide any evidence that EU-banned ingredients such as Oxadiargyl and Ethoxysulfuron are necessary to address these issues.
More than 81,000 tonnes of pesticides containing chemicals prohibited in the EU were exported mostly to low-income countries in 2018 alone, according to the European Environmental Bureau.
In West Africa, pesticide imports doubled from 218,948 tonnes in 2015 to 437,930 by 2020. Nigeria alone imported 147,446 tonnes of pesticides in the same year.
Eko Omobola, founder of the Urban Tree Revival Initiative, currently researching the socio-economic impact of integrated environmental infrastructures at the University of Tuscia, Italy, says lax government oversight and porous markets are among the factors fuelling toxic and fake crop protection chemicals in Nigeria.
But to become a major agrochemical distributor of these banned chemicals, all it takes is to “have interest in the product, reach out to the company and they make you a distributor,” says John Akinbimi, a pesticide wholesaler at the Chemical Market.
With a strong connection in the Nigerian agrochemical industry, Akinbimi says top agrochemical companies sometimes import the chemicals in large batches which are then repackaged in smaller quantities for local distributors like himself.
Hennig says Bayer is collaborating with 21 distributors across major agrochemical markets in Nigeria, selected to ensure they share its “values of safety and sustainability”.
“Regulatory compliance is a cornerstone of our distributor selection process,” he adds.
“We rigorously verify that potential partners are registered with relevant authorities, such as the Corporate Affairs Commission, and that they adhere to agrochemical regulations set forth by organizations like NAFDAC and the Environmental Management Agency. This ensures that operations are conducted legally and safely.”
FRAZZLED REGULATIONS
Despite the European Commission’s commitment to a Chemicals Strategy towards a toxic-free environment, Chinasa and other specialists interviewed describe the continued importation of banned toxic pesticides as a “double standard” that threatens ecosystems of importing countries, where there are often less stringent laws on their uses.
While few of the EU banned pesticides are imported from the EU – and the Chemicals Strategy aims to prevent this – companies are able to produce and export the products from third-party countries. Paraquat for instance is produced by Syngenta at its plant in Huddersfield in the UK.
READ ALSO: Flooded Farms, Poisoned Water: The Pollution ‘Caused by Nigeria’s Largest Sugar Refinery’
Legal experts say there is some potential to address these circumstances with the recently passed European Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. This provides a potential avenue to hold companies which are either established in the EU or have a strong presence on the EU market to account for their human rights, regardless of the country of origin of their exports.
What it does not do, however, is “automatically ban all export of pesticides that are banned in the EU”, according to Ben Vanpeperstraete, a legal advisor at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.
“The new rules will ensure that companies that either are established in the EU, or have a strong presence on the EU market, identify and address adverse human rights and environmental impacts of their actions inside and outside Europe,” says Johanna Bernsel, a spokeswoman for the European Commission.
She adds that the rules will apply to a large range of pesticides that have an adverse environmental impact.
The commission did not comment on its position on companies bypassing EU bans by producing their products in third-party countries to export.
PESTICIDE POISONING
In farming communities in Niger state, farmers say they use a cocktail of different pesticides for greater effect.
“Over time, the continued use of these chemicals can introduce heavy metals to the soil, water and the ecosystem…It can also affect the ecosystem at large,” says Chinasa at the Federal University of Allied Health Science.
According to the 2022 global Pesticide Atlas, 385 million people fall ill every year from pesticide poisoning and 95 percent of these people live in the global South.
In 2020, about 270 people in Benue State, an agrarian state in north-central Nigeria, died from banned toxic pesticides from a contaminated river.
A recent media review of farm chemical poisoning from 2008 to 2021 by the Alliance for Action on Pesticide in Nigeria and Small-scale Women Farmers Organization in Nigeria revealed 24 incidents across Nigeria that resulted in around 500 deaths.
The report, which also captured snapshots of the most frequently used pesticides by small-scale farmers across four states in Nigeria, revealed that 80 percent were hazardous and banned in EU states.
Omobola at Tuscia University explains the damage these toxic pesticides can do to the environment.
“Pesticides increase the acidity of the soil,” she says.
“When it is washed out during erosion, it affects aquatic life and waterbodies.
“When pesticides are applied, some greenhouse gases are released, contributing to climate change. The soil is a huge carbon sink, so when the soil is fragile, carbon can easily be released back into the atmosphere.”
According to Nigeria’s Pesticides Registration Regulation 2021, any pesticide entering the Nigerian market must be certified by the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC).
In 2023, the NAFDAC website listed over 660 pesticides and agrochemical products that contained active agents banned in the EU.
But curiously, by 2024, a search on the government website for pesticides or the pesticide registrants’ numbers all came back empty.
This was as a result of the government’s decision to deregister the products. However, a total scrub of the database left the public in the dark on the actual products on the market, preventing scrutiny of their health implications. NAFDAC did not respond to emails sent to it.
At least 37 products in the now deleted list were imported by EU agrochemicals, of which 16 chemicals (43 per cent) are already banned for use in fields in the EU.
A spokesperson for the NGO Greenpeace says “exporting products to other countries that EU lawmakers have deemed unsafe for Europeans is hypocritical, cruel, unfair and intolerable”.
According to NAFDAC, the importation of Paraquat and Atrazine should have stopped in 2023. The ban and enforcement action for Paraquat and Atrazine was set to commence on January 1, 2024 and 2025 respectively, according to the agency.
Leslie Olonyi, a Kenyan environmental lawyer, believes this extended phase-out is a “classic lobbying move by agrochemicals and government agencies in developing countries to keep making their money”.
Given that CropLife Nigeria, a lobby group representing six large agrochemical multinationals, will have seats on a proposed Nigeria Pesticide Council, activists fear the ban may never be implemented.
Emails were sent to NAFDAC and CropLife Nigeria, but they were not responded to at press time.
In Brazil, where Syngenta and others lobbied against the ban of paraquat, there were “claims by industry that there would be loss of production yields [but] this did not happen,” according to Laurent Gaberell, from Public Eye, a Swiss NGO.
“When bans are implemented, there are already alternatives on the market from the same companies trying to stop the ban. In Brazil Syngenta was able to replace paraquat sales with diaquat, which while still able to cause harm, is still less toxic if ingested,” says Gaberell.
Presently, the EU rejects more than 70 percent of Nigerian food exports, including dried beans, due to high pesticide residuals.
However, food testing is rare in Nigeria. With over half the population living below the poverty belt, farmers unknowingly consume and sell produce containing chemicals above minimum residual levels.
Since the death of Beatrice, Manu says he has attended farmers workshops on ethical use of pesticides, which highlights the effects of incorrect usage.
The list of registered pesticides in Nigeria can be found here.
This story was supported by Earth Investigations Grant Programme of Journalismfund
Subscribe
Be the first to receive special investigative reports and features in your inbox.