During the Soviet era, pesticides were habitually overused or misused in efforts to boost food production. Today, large quantities of obsolete and banned pesticides pose a significant threat to people’s health and the environment.

Georgia said goodbye to the last of its stocks of old pesticides last month, as a convoy of trucks transported the material to France for incineration. Georgia is the most recent country to benefit from a large FAO regional project aimed at cleaning up obsolete pesticides in Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova.