Fake pesticides endanger crops and human health in India
19/11/2015 22:00
* Fakes account for up to 30 pct of $4 bln pesticide
market-report
* Indian government aware of problem and may toughen
penalties
* Fake pesticides cut food output by 10 mln tonnes/year
By Krishna N. Das
FARIDABAD, India, Nov 20 (Reuters) - Millions of
unsuspecting Indian farmers are spraying fake pesticides onto
their fields, contaminating soil, cutting crop yields and
putting both food security and human health at risk in the
country of 1.25 billion people.
The use of spurious pesticides has exacerbated losses in the
genetically modified (GM) cotton crop in northern India after an
attack by whitefly, a pest, say officials. If unchecked, some of
India's roughly $26 billion in annual farm exports could be hit.
Made secretly and given names that sometimes resemble the
original, counterfeits account for up to 30 percent of the $4
billion pesticide market, according to a government-endorsed
study.
And they are gaining market share in what is the world's
No.4 pesticide maker and sixth biggest exporter.
Influential dealers in small towns peddle high-margin fake
products to gullible farmers, in turn hurting established firms
like Syngenta SYNN.VX , Bayer CropScience BAYE.NS , DuPont
DD.N , BASF BASF.NS , PI Industries PIIL.NS , Rallis India
RALL.NS and Excel Crop Care EXCR.NS .
"We are illiterate farmers; we seek advice from the vendor
and just spray on the crop," said Harbans Singh, a farmer in
Punjab's Bathinda region, whose three-acre (1.2-hectare) GM
cotton crop was damaged by whitefly this year.
"It's a double loss when you see the crop wilting away and
your money is spent on pesticides that don't work."
But S.N. Sushil, who heads India's top pesticide testing
laboratory in Faridabad, near Delhi, said farmers panic at the
first sight of a pest attack.
As a result, they overuse chemicals, reducing their
effectiveness and raising costs.
Sushil's team worked overtime after Punjab sent nearly 1,000
samples of suspect pesticides following the whitefly outbreak,
finding some to be falsely labelled.
Indian officials tested nearly 50,000 pesticide samples last
fiscal year, finding around 3 percent of them "misbranded",
Sushil said.
He added the government was increasing inspections and
looking to increase penalties, including jail terms of up to 10
years.
TOXIC RACKET
Lax laws, which punish by revoking licences or imposing
short jail terms for offenders, and staffing shortages
compromise efforts to track and seize substandard products.
Toxic pesticides that are banned abroad continue, meanwhile,
to be sold freely in India.
India still permits the use of monocrotophos, a pesticide
blamed for the death of 23 children in Bihar in 2013 after they
ate contaminated free school lunches. That tragedy prompted the
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations to
advise developing countries to phase out such chemicals.
"Use of excessive pesticides has been a cause for concern
for quite some time," said Shyam Khadka, FAO's India
representative. "Now if they turn out to be spurious it's a
cause for even greater worry."
Chronic exposure to pesticides can lead to depression, a
factor in suicides, he said. Pesticides can also cause cancer.
In recent years the European Union and Saudi Arabia
temporarily stopped buying some vegetables from India after
finding pesticide residues in produce. Indian officials say such
cases result from the overuse of chemicals.
RAPID GROWTH IN FAKES
India's fake pesticide industry is expanding at 20 percent
per year while the overall market is growing at 12 percent.
"We know that a racket is going on," said P.K. Chakrabarty,
an assistant director general of Indian Council of Agricultural
Research. "But it is only when suspicion arises that people go
to inspect."
He also said illegal chemicals are imported "under the garb
of good material", and that there was a "definite risk" of some
fake pesticides being exported from India, although there was no
evidence yet.
"Theoretically it becomes a risk, but practically there are
checks and balances," said Gantakolla Srivastava, CEO of
CropLife India, an association of the top pesticide companies
operating in the country.
KNOCK OFFS
Karnataka state authorities this month seized large stocks
of "Korajen", an illegal copy of DuPont's Coragen used to kill
rice pests. Police are investigating similar cases elsewhere,
DuPont said.
Punjab has also filed police cases against fake pesticide
makers and arrested a senior official at its agriculture
university for allowing the sale of counterfeits. urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL3N12Z3XG
Apart from counterfeiting, India is also grappling with
rising cases of unmonitored chemicals passed off as herbal
pesticides, said Srivastava.
India loses about 4 percent, or over 10 million tonnes, of
food output a year due to fake pesticides, said the
government-backed study.
"There has been a trend of increasing consumption of
(fake)products as against the regular ones," said Manish Panchal
of Tata Strategic Management Group that conducted the study.
"All stakeholders should be worried ... it's going to hit
food security."
Last year spurious fungicides cut apple production in Jammu
& Kashmir state, while farming lobbyists have linked recent
farmer suicides in Odisha to fake pesticides.
Some producers say they have been wrongly targeted by
government laboratories. Coromandel Agrico, for example, was
accused of selling falsely labelled products.
Tests that found it selling pesticides in incorrect dosages
were inaccurate, said Vipin Bisht, the company's regulatory
affairs officer.
"We will not take the risk of selling sub-standard
products," Bisht said. "The problem is at the dealer/distributor
level. Similar sounding products are made, mixed, sold."
<^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Fake pesticides in India http://link.reuters.com/wem95w
The poison pill in India's search for cheap food http://reut.rs/1GXNLwK
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(Additional reporting by Rupam Jain Nair in BHATINDA, Jatindra
Dash in BHUBANESWAR and Mayank Bhardwaj in NEW DELHI; Editing by
Douglas Busvine and Mike Collett-White)
((Krishna.Das@thomsonreuters.com; +91-11-4178-1023,
+91-98711-18314; Reuters Messaging:
Krishna.Das.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net, https://twitter.com/krishnadas56))
Keywords: INDIA PESTICIDES/