A/HRC/34/48 fully aware that they would not be authorized for sale in the country where the company is based. 63 To subject individuals of other nations to toxins known to cause major health damage or fatality is a clear human rights violation. 74. Finally, international trade deals threaten to lower standards of protection from toxic pesticides while increasing the risk of harm to the environment and to citizens. The European Parliament has expressed concern that regulatory convergence through the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership risks aligning common standards at the lowest common denominator. The Parliament further contends that the pesticides industry consistently considers protective regulations as “trade irritants” that obstruct trade.64 B. Other challenges 75. In addition to the legal gaps and dual standards noted above, there are other challenges derived from excessive or inaccurate use of pesticides, accidents, and dissemination of misinformation and misconceptions by producers. Personal protective equipment and labels 76. Pesticide companies and Governments often argue that exposure risk to pesticides is generally low if personal protective equipment is properly used. Yet in reality, compliance with recommended personal protective equipment practices is generally low, for a number of reasons. 77. Personal protective equipment may be unsuitable for local working conditions, for example extreme heat and humidity, steep terrain and thick vegetation. Other factors may include pressure to work as fast as possible, lack of training on the health risks of exposure or trainings conducted in non-native languages, coupled with high turnover of workers. 78. Warning labels on pesticides may also be ineffective owing to the small size of print used on container labels, failure to translate instructions into local languages and low literacy rates among pesticide users. While pictograms and other creative labelling tactics may try to address some of these problems, without training, agricultural workers may still have difficulty deciphering colour codes or warning symbols. 79. The repackaging of pesticides into smaller amounts for retail is also of grave concern. Pesticides are often transferred from labelled containers that meet safety standards into unlabelled, mislabelled or inappropriate containers, such as old water bottles, to be sold alongside foodstuffs. 80. The industry frequently uses the term “intentional misuse” to shift the blame onto the user for the avoidable impacts of hazardous pesticides. Yet clearly, the responsibility for protecting users and others throughout the pesticide life cycle and throughout the retail chain lies with the pesticide manufacturer. This is reflected, for example, in the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights on “business relationships”, which set a precedent by requiring businesses to have producer responsibility for certain products even 63 64 For example, paraquat has been banned in Switzerland and Europe for years. However, Syngenta, based in Switzerland, continues to distribute the product overseas. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency restricts but does not prohibit the export of unapproved or unregistered pesticides to third countries. See Paulo Prada, “Paraquat: a controversial chemical’s second act”, Reuters, 2 April 2015. Erica Smith, David Azoulay and Baskut Tuncak, Lowest Common Denominator: How the Proposed EU-US Trade Deal Threatens to Lower Standards of Protection from Toxic Pesticides (Centre for International Environmental Law, 2015), pp. 2-3. 17