Crop loss at Rs 1.5 lakh cr each yr

Pests, weeds, diseases take a toll on produce, says agriculture minister.

The country is losing agricultural production worth Rs 1.48 lakh crore annually due to damage from pests, weeds and plant diseases, according to the Crop Care Foundation of India (CCFI).

This reckoning is based on Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar's statement in the Rajya Shabha indicating that around 10-30 per cent of the farm produce was lost every year due to pests, weeds and diseases.

The parliamentary standing committee on petroleum and chemicals had in 2002 put the annual crop loss due to pests at Rs 90,000 crore and had recommended the increased use of pesticides, especially weedicides and fungicides, to cut down the losses.

Federation officials R G Agarwal and Salil Singhal said plant protection chemicals were currently used only on 20 per cent of the total cultivated area. The majority of Indian farmers were not using chemical pesticides and were, therefore, losing their investment in seeds, fertiliser, irrigation and labour to damage to the crops by pests, diseases and weeds.

The per-hectare use of pesticides in India in 2002 was too low, a merely 0.33 kg a hectare, compared with over 3 kg in France, 4.17 kg in Italy and 13.14 kg in Japan, as per the OECD (Organisation for Economic and Development) Environmental Data Compendium.

India had less than 200 registered plant protection molecules though the crop area in the country was the second largest in the world.

In contrast, countries with much small cultivated area had wider diversity of molecules in use. Vietnam, for instance, had 432 registered plant protection products and Pakistan had 495.

The CCFI officials stressed the need for re-orienting the official policies to encourage the production and use of new generation pesticides, and to deal with the menace of spurious pesticides.

The pesticides registration procedures needed to be revamped to allow quick introduction of new, more effective and environmentally safer products and formulation.

They pointed out that there was a strong case for boosting the consumption of plant protection chemicals from the present around Rs 4,000 crore a year to at least Rs 10,000 crore. "This will help Indian farmers boost production worth Rs 30,000 crores annually, considering that the cost-benefit ratio of pesticide use is at 1:5," said Agarwal and Singhal.

Expansion of plant protection umbrella was a must if the agricultural sector's growth had to be raised to 4.1 per cent as targeted in the 11th plan, Federation officials asserted.

They maintained that the government could help in bringing down the plant protection costs by rationalising the taxation structure on pesticides. Like fertilisers, seeds, tractors and other farm inputs, the pesticides should also be exempted from the excise duty. Besides, the value-added tax (VAT) on pesticides should be brought down either to nil or a maximum of 1 per cent, at par with other inputs.

They said the current pesticides regulatory system had failed to check manufacturing, distribution and use of spurious and sub-standard pesticides, to the detriment of both the pesticides industry and the farmers. The system should, therefore, be suitably revamped to make it effective in checking this menace.