Georgina Downs

Georgina Downs is the founder of the UK Pesticides Campaign. After many years of ill-health, following exposure to pesticide use on agricultural land near to where she lived, she started the campaign in order to change the UK Government's regulations governing use of agricultural pesticides.

In 2006, she was honoured by several organisation for her ceaseless campaigning to change health regulations that would have the potential to benefit millions of people across the UK who live in areas that are affected by agricultural pesticides.

Ill Health

About a year after moving into their new property in a rural area, adjacent fields were bought by a local farmer to be used for intensive agriculture. During the years that followed, The Downs family enjoyed their rural location, regularly spending time outdoors and having the house windows and doors open - including, unbeknownst to the Downs family at the time, during the spraying season in summer.

After some years, Georgina's health deteriorated. She suffered many health problems including flu-like symptoms, headaches, mouth blisters, and, most severely, muscle wastage that required hospitalisation. She attributed this to many years' cumulative exposure to pesticide spraying.

UK Pesticides Campaign

Main article: UK Pesticides Campaign

Continued ill health as the years went on resulted in Downs deciding she had suffered enough. Researching the subject of pesticides and their effects on human health, she resolved to challenge government regulations. The UK Pesticides Campaign was started in 2001. It centres on the issue of pesticide exposure for people in agricultural areas.

Downs has gained much support from the public in rural areas, and has been honoured by several organisations for her determined campaigning. She now has a database of many hundreds of people who have informed her of their own illnesses due to their proximity to farms that use pesticides.

Downs' campaigning resulted in the UK Government initially asking their own advisors - the ACP (Advisory Committee on Pesticides) - to conduct a study in 2002 into current practice and the evidence supplied by Downs. The ACP subsequently dismissed the evidence as inadequate. Late in 2004, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution was requested to conduct a study into the effects of pesticides on human health. The RCEP's report agreed with Downs' claim that current regulations are inadequate, unfortunately the report also proposed that a mere five-metre buffer zone be imposed around any agricultural land that is subject to spraying. Downs considered this conclusion to be arbitrary and inadequate.

Downs won a landmark High Court Judicial Review action in 2008 against the Government for failing to protect people in the countryside from pesticides and also knowingly allowing residents to continue to suffer from adverse health effects without taking any action to prevent the exposure, risks and adverse impacts occurring. The Judgment concluded that Downs had produced “solid evidence that residents have suffered harm to their health”, particularly in relation to acute effects, and that “a different approach” should have been adopted and accordingly there has “been both a failure to have regard to material considerations and a failure to apply the [European] Directive properly.” This legal challenge was the first known legal case of its kind to reach the High Court to directly challenge the Government’s pesticide policy and approach regarding crop spraying in rural areas. The ruling is obviously a very significant and landmark ruling for the potentially millions of residents throughout the country who, like Downs, live in the locality to pesticide sprayed fields. The press release Georgina Downs issued regarding her High Court victory and the full statement she made outside the High Court on 14 November 2008 can be seen on her UK Pesticides Campaign website at:- www.pesticidescampaign.co.uk.

However, Defra appealed the ruling and it was overturned in the Court of Appeal in July 2009, but only as a result of bizarrely substituting Ms. Downs' evidence with the conclusions of a Government requested and funded report 4 years earlier in 2005. This meant that the Court of Appeal Judgment was not even based on the same case, arguments and evidence that had led to herlandmark victory in the High Court. In reviewing a High Court judgment the Court of Appeal would have needed to have based its judgment on the same case, arguments and evidence that had led to that High Court judgment. Unfortunately, it did not. Ms. Downs has now taken her case to the European Court of Human Rights and is currently awaiting a decision.

Awards and nominations

Inspirational Eco Woman of the Year Award. In May 2008 Georgina won the first ever Inspirational Eco Woman of the Year Award in the Daily Mail’s 2008 Inspirational Women of the Year Awards.

Andrew Lees Memorial Award. In 2006, Downs was judged joint winner of the prestigious Andrew Lees Memorial Award at the British Environment and Media Awards in recognition of her campaigning efforts.

Heroine Award. In 2006, Georgina was honoured at Cosmopolitan magazine’s inaugural Fun Fearless Female Awards with Olay for "her tenacious and fearless campaign on the health risks of pesticides."

In September 2008 Georgina was voted the most inspiring pioneer in The Observer’s Secret Pioneer poll with more than 61% of the vote.

Woman of the Year. Georgina was named a 2008 "Woman of the Year" and invited to the prestigious Women of the Year Lunch at the Guildhall in London on Monday 13 October 2008 in recognition of her campaign. The Women of the Year Lunch was founded in 1955 by the late Tony Lothian OBE, the late Odette Hallowes, and the late Lady Georgina Coleridge to bring together outstanding women from all walks of life, creating one of the most significant assemblies of women in the world in recognition of their individual achievements. Every woman is individually nominated by a member of the Women of the Year Nominating Council and is considered a “Woman of the Year” because of their special contribution to society or the workplace. Georgina was nominated by the Chairman of the Women of the Year, Gill Carrick.

Listed in the Guardian Newspapers 25 People of the Year 2008 (2nd in the list behind Lewis Hamilton)

Included in the Inspirational Women 2009: Role Models for our time feature in the March 2009 edition of Vogue magazine

Runner up in the Grassroots Campaigner category in the Observer Ethical Awards 2009

Nominated for the Political Impact Award in the 2008 Channel 4 Political Awards

Nominated in the first ever “Inspiration Awards for Women” in October 2008.

Nominated for Campaigner of the Year in the Observer Ethical Awards 2006.

Nominated in the Campaigning category of the Great Britons Awards 2006.

Farmers Weekly listed Georgina in the Top 20 Power Players in UK Farming of 2006, and again at number 9 in its recent 2011 list of influential campaigners involved with British agriculture.

Listed at No. 5 in the BBC Good Food Magazine Top 10 Eco Heros of 2006.

Georgina was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA).

References

1. UK Pesticide Campaign, Georgina Downs biography page
2. Resurgence, "Georgina vs Goliath"
3. The Ecologist, "Pesticide Nun"

External links

• UK Pesticides Campaign

Further reading

• Georgina Downs' UK Pesticides Campaign website www.pesticidescampaign.co.uk
• Silent Spring, Penguin Books Ltd., 2000. ISBN 0-141-18494-9