The Landworkers’ Alliance is a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers.

Feedback for us

If you have any comments, critiques, considerations, compliments, complaints, about anything the Landworkers Alliance is or isn’t up to, do let us know your thought. We love feedback, it keeps a system healthy. Please fill in this quick form.

Membership / Supporter / Donation Queries

Please contact Lauren.Simpson@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

Requests for work, volunteering or internships

We are currently not recruiting for any roles but please read our newsletters for any announcements. We currently do not offer any volunteer or internship placements directly with the LWA, but keep an eye out in the newsletter or on the forum for any members looking for volunteers or workers.

Academic/Research Enquiries

Please look at the Agroecology Research Collaboration to see if it fits your area of research/work.

Membership Support / Advice

Currently the LWA does not have capacity or resources to help individual members or potential members on their specific projects, farms or programmes. We get a lot of requests for individual support and would love to have the time to respond to each request in full. We are fundraising for a new role for somebody to focus on membership support and services as we have identified it is a gap in our offering so please watch this space. Having said that, if your query is critical and urgent please email info@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk including the word URGENT in the subject header and it will get picked up and we can try our best to help.

Contacting Individual Staff

Please take the time to explore our staff page here to see who the most relevant contact for your enquiry is.

Our addresses format is firstname.lastname@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

Please bear in mind we all work part time and have limited capacity to respond to enquiries outside our core areas of work.

You can also find information under the About Us header about branch and regional organising, and identity groups within the LWA membership.

Press/Media Enquiries:

For any queries relating to press please email press@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

Merchandise/calendar Enquiries

For any enquiries to do with shop sales including the calendar please email merchandise@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

To Include an Item in Our Newsletter:

You can fill in this quick form to submit it to be included in the next bulletin/newsletter. The deadline to submit is the end of Friday each week for the following week’s member bulletin. With the same form you can also submit to the monthly non-member newsletter which goes out in the first week of the month.

All Other Enquiries:

For any other enquiries that are URGENT please email info@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk with the word ‘urgent’ in the subject header and we will do our best to help.

Follow Us

Stop Exporting Banned Pesticides

(2022 - ongoing)

What’s the Issue?

Investigations have revealed that in 2020 the UK Government permitted the export of over 12,000 tonnes of UK-manufactured ‘Banned Pesticides’, despite these chemicals being banned for use in the UK due to the severe risks they pose to human health and the environment . However, loopholes in international trade law are allowing for companies such as Syngenta to manufacture these pesticides – namely the toxic herbicide Paraquat – and export them to countries where they are permitted for use.

With Paraquat ‘one sip can kill’, and evidence is mounting of the numerous adverse health conditions linked with exposure to the chemical. Furthermore, many of the UK’s exports are bing shipped to low and middle-income countries including Colombia, India, Mexico, Guatemala and Ecuador where weaker regulations, inadequate protective equipment and a lack of translated instructions and labels means that farmers in these countries are at a much higher risk of exposure, illness, and death. Tens of thousands of people – including many children – have died from ingesting Paraquat since the British company Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) first put it on the market in 1962.

To make matters worse, the UK Government is also currently pushing for increased trade with Brazil – a country where Paraquat use is permitted, and where it has caused more deaths in the past decade than any other pesticide permitted for use.

A new trade deal with Brazil could mean that not only would UK consumers be eating food laced with toxic pesticide residues, but UK farmers would be undercut by lower import standards, while the deadly risks of pesticide use are exported onto food producers in other countries.

 

What are we doing?

We’ve written to key Government departments asking them to put an end to the double standards, to stop granting export licenses for toxic pesticides banned for use in the UK and to put measures in place to protect UK food import standards when it comes to toxic pesticide residues.

On May 7th 2022 the LWA Norther Branch also organised a demonstration outside the Syngenta factory in Huddersfield to highlight the UK’s double standards when it comes to pesticide trade. You can read more about the demo in this blog post, and in this Yorkshire Examiner news article.

What can you do?

For more information on how to get involved please email Yali on yali.bantonheath@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk.

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