Food scare: Indian farmers being duped into buying fake pesticides that can kill
Lax laws and enforcement behind surge in use of illicit chemicals
PUBLISHED : Saturday, 21 November, 2015, 10:07pm
UPDATED : Saturday, 21 November, 2015, 10:07pm
Reuters in New Delhi
India's farmers are losing out as fake pesticide use surges. Photo: EPA
Millions of unsuspecting Indian farmers are spraying fake pesticides on to 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, said officials. If unchecked, some of India's roughly US$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 per cent of the US$4 billion pesticide market, according to a government-endorsed study.
But the fake pesticide industry is expanding at 20 per cent per year while the overall market is growing at 12 per cent.
Influential dealers in small towns peddle high-margin fake products to farmers, in turn hurting established firms like Syngenta, Bayer Crop Science, DuPont, BASF, PI Industries, Rallis India and Excel Crop Care.
"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 and as a result 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 per cent of them "misbranded", he said.
He added the government was increasing inspections and looking to increase penalties, including jail terms of up to 10 years. 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 2013 after they ate contaminated free school lunches.
That tragedy prompted the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations to advise developing countries to phase out such chemicals