.jpg) Pesticides are toxic chemicals designed, as the name suggests, to kill “pests”:any living thing which can damage crops. Pesticides include several categories:insecticides are designed to kill insects; herbicides kill weeds, and so on.
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 Pesticides are designed to be toxic. Many pesticides are severely harmful to human health and the environment, and responsible for the poisoning of numerous people, livestock and wildlife.Some have been linked to cancer. Some are based on WW2 nerve gases and damage the nervous system, whether insect or human. Many also disrupt the hormonal balance in our body: they threaten our potential to reproduce, and to have healthy offspring. Finally, some pesticides remain in the environment for decades: they accumulate in the fatty tissues of animals and contaminate the environment far from where they were used.
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Pesticides have become increasingly expensive. The cost of chemicals can be as much as 60% of farmers’ production costs, which leads to severe indebtedness. Pesticides often lose their effectiveness after a few years because pests are able to adapt and become resistant to them. Farmers are then trapped in an endless cycle where they must buy an ever-increasing quantity of pesticides or switch to newer, more expensive chemicals. Each year thousands of farmers commit suicide because they cannot pay their debts. Ironically, they often do so by ingesting the pesticides which have caused their despair.
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 It is a multi-stakeholder partnership bringing together skills and expertise of multi-national organizations, international non-governmental organizations, governments and industry. The scope of the ASP is 10-15 years, implemented over a series of projects, at an estimated total clean-up and prevention cost of US$250 million
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