Spray Fallout

Fake pesticides are silently spoiling Kashmir's most precious crop. Farmers are losing yields, trust, and time, and the damage goes deeper than fruit.

- Dr. Waseem Ahmad

I've spent years walking through the apple orchards of Shopian, listening to the rustle of leaves and watching the fruit turn from green to red.

I work at the Ambri Apple Research Centre, and for people like me - researchers, farmers, field officers - the apple isn’t just a fruit. It's our economy, our identity, our everyday story.

But lately, something has changed. And it’s not just the weather or market prices. It’s what we spray on our trees.

Fake pesticides are showing up more and more across Kashmir, and they're slowly poisoning not just our apples, but our confidence.

In places like Shopian and Sopore, growers are spraying their orchards regularly. They're doing everything they've been told.

But pests keep coming back — scab, aphids, woolly apple aphids, and now the Leaf Miner too.

Fruits are showing blemishes, ripening unevenly, and spoiling faster after harvest. The apples look good from a distance, but the problems lie beneath the skin.

A young farmer from my area, Murtaza Wagay, told me something that stuck with me. “We can't tell what's real and what's fake anymore,” he said. “The dealers give us bottles with labels in English. We trust them, spray them, and sometimes we lose everything.”