Syngenta: a poisoner without borders

Syngenta is an agrochemical firm, headquartered in Switzerland and owned by the Chinese conglomerate ChemChina since 2017. Together with Bayer-Monsanto, BASF and Corteva, these four companies dominate the market¹ for pesticides², commercial seeds, and increasingly stacked trait herbicides. Syngenta's toxic empire spans nearly 90 countries, poisoning the bodies of workers and local residents, as well as their land, water and crops across the globe³.

Syngenta's pesticides are notorious for their toxicity⁴ – paraquat, thiamethoxam, chlorothalonil, atrazine, diquat – straight out of the depths of their laboratories. Some are banned in Europe due to their harmful effects on health, but can still be exported from Europe, France and Switzerland^5–11 to countries in the Global South, such as Brazil¹² and India¹³. This regulatory double standard protects people in the West whilst poisoning farmers and local residents in the Global South against a backdrop of environmental racism.

Furthermore, Syngenta has failed to implement¹⁴ human rights due diligence in relation to the use of its products and provides neither training nor instructions on the labels. Farmers and workers handling these products on a regular basis are, once again, the most affected by their toxicity. Beyond that, paraquat and diquat are also among the pesticides most commonly used by farmers to take their own lives¹⁵, as they are trapped in economic dependence on these products.

Today, long-standing patents on pesticides are expiring and the industry is undergoing a transformation in the face of a flood of generic products¹⁶ on the market¹⁷. Syngenta and its ilk are exploiting fluctuations in intellectual property rights to dilute their historical responsibility for the spread of these poisons.

Syngenta kills and intimidates to silence peasant uprisings. In 2026, the Superior Court of Justice in Brazil confirmed the civil liability¹⁸ of Syngenta and its obligation to pay compensation for the murder of landless farmer Valmir Mota de Oliveira, known as Keno. Keno was a leader of the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil and was protesting against Syngenta's illegal experiments with genetically modified seeds.

Pesticides in peacetime, chemical weapons in wartime

In wartime, companies that would go on to dominate the agrochemical sector were mobilized to produce explosives. This stems from a shared chemical and industrial infrastructure: the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia, and the resulting compound ammonium nitrate, underpin both nitrogen fertilizers and nitrate-based explosives¹⁹. Chemical engineering has since devised lucrative industrial strategies to sell its products in both registers: undermining peasant autonomy in peacetime, and suppressing anti-imperialist and anti-colonial resistance in wartime.

Nobel Industries, one of the four companies that merged into Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) – a corporate ancestor of Syngenta – was a major explosives supplier during the First World War. ICI itself, formed in 1926, became a major wartime explosives producer during the Second World War²⁰. ICI also supplied the British colonial administration in Malaya with a mixture of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, which was sprayed from the early 1950s against the Malayan National Liberation Army, the insurgent force fighting British colonial rule²¹. The US herbicidal warfare program in Vietnam, Operation Ranch Hand, which produced Agent Orange, was directly modeled on this British colonial precedent²².

Currently, the expanding and intensifying use of pesticides is intertwined with a shifting geopolitical order and the rise of far-right and authoritarian politics²³, whose anti-regulatory agendas are producing deeply unequal patterns of exposure and harm across regions.

Syngenta, a seed monopolist that erases farmers' knowledge

The industrial production of pesticides is intrinsically linked to the control of seeds, and thus to the loss of farmers' autonomy and the destruction of their knowledge. The oligopoly²⁴ comprising Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and BASF controls over 50 per cent of the commercial seed market. These are mostly uniform varieties, developed in a handful of laboratories, then planted across thousands of different plots of land around the world. For them to grow, they must therefore be doused with the chemicals produced by these very same firms.

These commercial seeds are protected by plant variety rights or patents that hinder the free circulation of seeds. Not only does this block the evolution of plants shaped by millennia of exchange amongst farmers – at a time when fields need diversity most to withstand the impacts of climate change – but Syngenta is also privatising resources that do not belong to it.

In 2013, for example, Syngenta was granted a patent on an insect-resistant pepper²⁵, even though the resistance originated from a wild Jamaican pepper that had been crossed with commercial peppers. The profits were never shared with the country from which the trait, allegedly stolen by Syngenta, naturally originated. Biopiracy and the privatisation of life are erasing farmers' traditional knowledge.

In 2003, the US military bombed Iraq's national seed bank. The transitional government during the occupation subsequently allowed international companies to patent seeds in Iraq whilst preventing farmers from saving and exchanging seeds. This climate enabled Syngenta²⁶ to establish a presence in the region and impose the sale of its products there. Alongside the seeds, the company sold stocks of tefluthrin and chlorothalonil on Iraqi farmland – active ingredients in pesticides classified as highly toxic and banned in Europe.

Adama, the Syngenta subsidiary helping to colonise Palestine and Lebanon

In 2020, Adama Agricultural Solutions, an Israeli subsidiary that produces generic pesticides, became part of the Syngenta Group. A report documented in 2019²⁷ showed how the Israeli military complemented its bulldozing of agricultural and residential lands close to the eastern border of Gaza with the unannounced aerial spraying of pesticides, destroying entire swaths of formerly arable land along the border fence, but also crops and farmlands hundreds of metres deep into Palestinian territory. One of the pesticides used was Diurex, produced by Adama.

The practice of aerial spraying of herbicides continues to this day. There have been many reports that the Israeli military flew²⁸ over border areas to Lebanon and Syria, spraying herbicides on agricultural fields, raising concerns about civilian exposure and the destruction of agricultural fields and the environment.

Adama is closely linked²⁹ to Israel's colonial expansion project. Their pesticides were used as part of agricultural experiments in the Jordan Valley, in the occupied West Bank, and on the Syrian Golan Heights, through research institutes. The company serves Israel's military-industrial complex. The State prides itself on being at the forefront of agritech and precision agriculture (drone pesticide spraying), but the development of this technology is oriented toward military ends. Agrochemical firms and arms firms advance hand in hand in carrying out this ecocide and genocide.

Digitalisation: a new danger for African small farmers

In Tanzania, Syngenta partnered with Yara, Rabobank, Bayer, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (founded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) to promote a digital platform known as MkulimaHub³⁰ to small farmers. The project is designed to get farmers to rely on the agronomic advice they receive and to encourage them to use the company's products, including seeds, pesticides and fertilisers. While the services are presented as a way to give farmers more information, they actually contribute to de-skilling, pushing farmers to depend on algorithm-generated advice and corporate inputs over their own local knowledge and seeds. The platform also links farmers with financial institutions providing loans. Syngenta is expanding digital agriculture in Africa and other parts of the world. This puts small farmers in a very precarious position³¹, locking them into an ongoing chemical treadmill and debt trap.

Chemical violence, an internationalist response

In solidarity with the peoples of the world resisting Syngenta's chemical violence and seed colonialism, dating back to before the well-known Green Revolution tactics, and with communities everywhere facing pesticide harm, our mobilisation on 3 October will take place alongside actions around the world where Syngenta is active: France, Costa Rica³², Pakistan, Switzerland³³, Belgium, Indonesia, Hawaii, the United States, Sweden, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

“Pesticides and Syngenta: not here, not anywhere!” Our mobilisation is intended to serve as a rallying point for the struggles of farmers, environmentalists, decolonial activists and those fighting for workers' health.