| July 26, 2022
The new Chairman of the Codex Alimentarius Committee on Pesticide Residues (CCPR) is Guibiao Ye and he is an excellent chairman. Unlike some others I have encountered, he lets everyone talk, he listens and thinks about what he’s heard, and then overall he makes sensible decisions. Above all, he doesn’t promote his own personal views and opinions as some sort of “consensus” of the Committee. Working well with the experienced Codex Secretariat, Gracia Brisco, he is just the kind of chairman that this Committee needs.
And this Committee held its 53rd meeting by Zoom from July 4-8, 2022, with the reading and correction of the report on July 13, 2022. While attendance of course varies with each passing day, it held reasonably steady at about 360-380 participants, with 40 of them being declared as members of CropLife International, the front group for the pesticide industry. There is no telling how many additional pesticide industry members are also attending as infiltrated members of country delegations. Then, there was one consumer representative present. Me.
Yes, that’s it. Once again, it was the NHF against the World. But what’s new? In 2018, at the in-person Hong Kong meeting of CCPR, the National Health Federation – the only consumer group represented at that committee meeting – spoke up against the following pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides as all posing public-health concerns: pyflubumide, chlorothalonil, glyphosate, buprofezin, bifenthrin, cyprodinil, dicamba, fluensulfone, and tolfenpyrad. At that meeting, an entire row of CropLife attendees snickered as NHF stated its case against glyphosate – just as I imagine many Trojans snickered and even laughed at Cassandra when she warned them about their impending deaths at the hands of the besieging Greeks. |
