A/HRC/34/48 were also detected, but a linkage was not scientifically proven. While local authorities banned aerial spraying following community protests, the Supreme Court of the Philippines reversed the ban, allegedly under pressure from banana corporations. 22 Further, suits brought by plantation workers have been dismissed, leaving victims without compensation. Twenty years on, despite a global ban on DBCP, soils and water sources remain contaminated. Indigenous communities 22. In various countries, agribusinesses have taken over lands belonging to indigenous and minority communities and instituted pesticide-dependent intensive agriculture. As a result, communities may be forced to live in marginal situations alongside such farms, regularly exposing them to pesticide drift. 23. Traditional food sources of indigenous peoples are regularly found to contain high levels of pesticides. This is also true in the Arctic, because chemicals travel northward through long-range environmental transport in wind and water, bioaccumulating and biomagnifying in traditional foods such as marine mammals and fish. 23 Indigenous peoples in the Arctic are found to have hazardous pesticides in their bodies that were never used near their communities, and suffer from above average rates of cancer and other diseases. Pregnant women and children 24. Children are most vulnerable to pesticide contamination, as their organs are still developing and, owing to their smaller size, they are exposed to a higher dose per unit of body weight; the levels and activity of key enzymes that detoxify pesticides are much lower in children than in adults. 24 Health impacts linked to childhood exposure to pesticides include impaired intellectual development, adverse behavioural effects and other developmental abnormalities.25 Emerging research is revealing that exposure to even low levels of pesticides, for example through wind drift or residues on food, may be very damaging to children’s health, disrupting their mental and physiological growth and possibly leading to a lifetime of diseases and disorders. 25. Pregnant women who are exposed to pesticides are at higher risk of miscarriage, pre-term delivery and birth defects. Studies have regularly found a cocktail of pesticides in umbilical cords and first faeces of newborns, proving prenatal exposure. 26 Exposure to pesticides can be transferred from either parent. The most critical period for exposure for the father is three months prior to conception, while maternal exposure is most dangerous from the month before conception through the first trimester of pregnancy. 27 Recent evidence suggests that pesticide exposure by pregnant mothers leads to higher risk of 22 23 24 25 26 27 Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific, response to the questionnaire on pesticides and the right to food. Alaska Native Health Board, “Traditional food contaminants testing projects in Alaska”, July 2002; Gretchen Welfinger-Smith and others, “Organochlorine and metal contaminants in traditional foods from St. Lawrence Island, Alaska”, Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, vol. 74, No.18 (September 2011). Beyond Pesticides, “Children and pesticides don’t mix”, Factsheet, available from http://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/lawn/factsheets/Pesticide.children.dontmix. pdf. Eyhorn, Reducing Pesticide Use, p. 9. Enrique Ostrea, Dawn Bielawski and N.C. Posecion, “Meconium analysis to detect fetal exposure to neurotoxicants”, Archive of Disease in Childhood, vol. 91, No. 8 (September 2006). Pesticide Action Network, response to the questionnaire on pesticides and the right to food, p. 3. 7