Since its establishment in 1985, TİSİT has advocated for the establishment of a plant health system in Turkey that protects human and environmental health and preserves biodiversity. To achieve this, TİSİT emphasizes the importance of implementing a good Plant Protection Product (PPP) Application Management System in our country, reducing risks arising from PPP use, and ensuring food security and food sovereignty. TİSİT supports the development of ecological or organic farming in Turkey. However, sustainable industrial plant production, which ensures the use of plant protection products (PPP) within Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) and in compliance with Integrated Pest Management (IPM) principles, making affordable food accessible to consumers, is indispensable for TİSİT.
In the domestic PPP industry, it is mandatory to use technical materials for PPP that comply with the current regulations and the specifications set by international organizations such as the EU, FAO, and WHO. The Ministry controls the imported technical raw materials intended for use in domestic production at the import stage. TİSİT advocates for the same controls to be applied to PPP imported as finished products. This is because, since both domestically produced and imported PPPs are available in the local market, it is believed that competition between these two types of PPPs will be fairer, ensuring better quality control. These measures will ensure that Turkish farmers can purchase and use safer PPPs.
The PPPs produced in our domestic and national industry are of the same quality, standards, and biological efficacy as the original PPPs of multinational corporations. The only difference is that they are cheaper than the originals. It should be emphasized that this positive development is due to the dedicated efforts of TİSİT’s loyal members.
TİSİT opposes the use of PPPs containing active ingredients deemed harmful to human and environmental health in the country’s agriculture. TİSİT fully supports the decisions taken by the Ministry, which follows EU practices in this regard. This is because, for TİSİT and its members, human health, food sovereignty, and agricultural product exports are non-negotiable.
Many of the active ingredients that have been banned in both the EU and Turkey are pesticides whose patents have expired and are used in our national industry’s PPP production. It should be noted that some of these active ingredients are not supported by their producers due to commercial reasons (because they are not profitable or because new active ingredients have been developed in their place) and have not been defended by the EU Commission. In fact, some of these active ingredients may not even be produced in the EU but could be used in our domestic plant products. Therefore, TİSİT believes it is more appropriate to reassess these active ingredients in detail, determine whether they are necessary for our country’s plant health system, whether they pose any adverse effects on human and environmental health, and decide whether to remove them from use after consulting with all relevant NGOs in the sector. As of May 2023, the total number of active ingredients banned in Turkey since 2000 is 217.