‘Pesticide-makers must strive for farmers awareness’

Vijay Trivedi

Mumbai, July 15: The Government has called upon the pesticide-makers to step up their awareness efforts among farmers in order to improve the overall declining offtake. Also, there is need to improve exports for which good scope exists under the new regime of World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Addressing a seminar in Mumbai last week, on ‘Indian Crop Protection Chemicals, Markets and Future Shifts’, organised by The Pesticides Manufacturers and Formulators Association of India (PMFAI), Ministry of Agriculture, secretary, BS Minhas said: “There is lack of information among farmers, as regards the use and timing of pesticides. While this could be one of the main cause for poor offtake of the products in the industry, it is the duty of industry players to increase the awareness of use of pesticides among end-users.”

Further, Mr Minhas also highlighted the fact that the industry has to take advantage of good scope for exports of pesticides.
Pesticides industry, however, felt that the government too can be helpful in simplifying complex pesticides registration norms aimed at improving exports.

Erratic monsoon and lack of proper awareness for the use of pesticides has led to the overall decline of production to around 60 per cent. This has sharply reduced the overall capacity utilisation to just around 30 per cent of the existing Rs 8,000 crore worth of installed capacity. The exports have declined to around Rs 1,500 crore from over Rs 1,800 cr in 1999-2000.

Addressing the seminar PAFAI, President, Pradeep Dave said: “During the last couple of years the overall offtake of the various pesticides has declined considerably. We intend to improve this through increased interaction both within the industry and with the farming community”.

Pesticides like monocrotophos, endosulphan, metasystox and dimethaote etc. are mainly used by the Indian farmers.

Further, due to the complicated policy of the Indian government, more and more pesticide-maker and formulators are not able to register their product in time. Which has resulted in heavy slowdown in production. Mr Dave added.

Mr Dave further said: “In the cut-throat competition, the Indian government needs to simplify export registration policy and help the industry to boost exports.”

During last three years Indian pesticides is passing through a very bad time in both domestic and export front. In domestic front, coupled with other reasons, due to misinterpretation of various chapters of excise law Pesticides industry had to face penalty and recovery of over Rs 160 crore in the last year.

Addressing the participants, consultant, Vijay Rai said: “Indian pesticides industry will have good advantage with WTO agreement in longer time. Provided the industry takes up major automation programme for high quality, higher yields and better purity, which currently is not at a satisfactory level”.

Mr Rai further said, as Indian pesticides industry has several advantages to boost domestic demand and exports. “We need to take advantage of these and improve both production and exports”.

Mr Rai felt that the Indian industry needs to have its own representative for the registration and collection of data in the foreign countries. This will help the industry to speed up its registration and other procedural formalities abroad. Lastly, Mr Dave said: “While export registration in UK, USA and China among other is available to the manufacturers within 15-30 days.

Indian registration policies are becoming more complicated, difficult and confusing, as many multinationals failed to convince the registration committee and in reverse they started confusing the registration committee by giving the wrong information and demanding complicated data requirement for registration.

All this and other complicated procedure, takes months to register Indian pesticides for exports, allege industry sources
Meanwhile, according to an international marketing consulting agency, Frost and Sullivan, on its latest report on ‘Crop protection chemicals market in India’ states that, Indian crop protection
chemicals market is still in its development stage.

The main factors restricting the growth of the pesticides market in India are:
* Integrated pest mangagement approach reduces pesticides usage.
* Bt cotton usage is a threat to the insecticides segment.
* Low financial strength of competitors and focus on generic manufacturing restricts the future market of pesticides.
* Low labour cost retards the market for herbicides.
* Total crop solution will drive down demand of pesticides.