Some Pest Killers Have Stings

Spurious pesticides make up almost a quarter of the market, exposing farmers, their harvest and the environment to harmful side-effects. Does the law have the teeth it needs to fight the fakes?

- Prabodh Krishna

N0 AQUARIUM, NO TANK IN A MARINE LAND, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal,” said the French explorer Jacques Yves Cousteau. Plants too like dolphins are always at their best in their genuine habitats and when nourished and protected by genuine nutrients.

Sub-standard, counterfeit or spurious agrochemical inputs, like pesticides for instance, often kill more than pests. They harm the harvest, the soil, and the environment, not to speak of farmers and farm hands tending the crop. “The bigger the population, the bigger the issue,” says D’Arcy Quinn, Director, AntiCounterfeiting at CropLife International, Switzerland. It is well-known that agrochemicals are very important for better crop yield. It is also inevitable that with the rapid rise in population, the use of agrochemicals is bound to increase. The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) expects the turnover of the Indian agrochemical industry to double to $8.1 billion by 2025.

The problem is that a significant quantity of agrochemicals (particularly pesticides) in the Indian market are not genuine, implying that they are ‘counterfeit’, ‘spurious’, ‘adulterated’ or ‘sub-standard’ me-toos of the certified bug annihilators or soil nutrients. Spurious insecticides are either ineffective in destroying pests or do not kill them efficiently.