"The agrochemical business suffered a major setback during 1999-2000 and had a negative growth of more than 10 per cent" said Indian Crop Protection Association (ICPA) chairman VR Kaundinya. "Erratic rainfall and unfavourbale crop economics have been the most adverse factors which affected our business during 1999".

Last Friday, addressing members of the agrochem industry, Kaundinya said "We hope that in the current year despite poor rain-fall our industry will register a positive growth of 5 per cent."

After ICPA's brain storming session reviewing the setback in agrochemical business during 99-2000, Indian Crop Protection Association has prepared strategic objective for next five years. Included in the list of the objectives are: safe and judicious use of pesticides, integrated pest management (IPM), environment protection, intellectual property rights (IPR), building up the confidence among the farmers, consumers, researchers and regulators in crop protection industry by inter-communicating with each other.

According to Kaundinya, the agrochem industry needs a new product portfolio aimed at addressing the following areas: Potential for exponential growth in exports of agro produce processed food, need for low residue chemicals, need for integrated pest management compatible chemicals and need to increase in productivity of land.

Few members of Indian Crop Protection Association has already started research on the problem faced by the Farmer particularly on weed and herbicides.

Focusing on new development in this regard, Monsonto Enterprises, National product development manager, Gyanendra Shukla said in his presentation:" New herbicides like `Isoproturon' (introduced during 1998-99) has shown good result for the wheat crop yield giving incremental wheat yield of 1.8 mn metric tonnes and total value of wheat produce around Rs 1,080 crore."Shukla further said that, new product in the pipeline are mostly similar in their mode of action. New research in this industry is expensive, requiring around Rs 600 crore to develop new molecule.

Indian farmers are still behind in use of new technologies like water management and drip irrigation, pesticides spraying etc. Though the technology is available to Indian farmers, they are not in a position to implement it in correct way due to lack of knowledge of the same.

Government of India's additional secretary, ministry of agriculture, Sathi Nair said: "The Indian farmer should be properly educated by the crop protection industry since they are the main end users of the product. In this technology, farmers should be the technology managers rather than merely a technology user.

We need to formulate indigenous technology as required by our farmer. More and more hazardous agro-chemicals used in agriculture should be avoided and industry must concentrate to develop herbicides for more use.

In India, government has banned some 21 pesticides for use in agriculture,18 pesticides have been refused registration and only 10 pesticides are allowed restricted use which are of toxic nature, Sathi Nair said.

Lastly, Federation of Farmers Association's, AP, president, P Chengal Reddy said: "We are worried about the future of the Indian agriculture industry, as in the new generation a farmers' son is not interested to continue his farming heritage and therefore, not taking serious interest to develop further in agriculture sectors.