Zen-Noh and pesticide makers nailed down flat pesticide prices

Price negotiations between the National Federation of Agricultural Co-operative Associations, or Zen-Noh, and each of the country’s pesticide makers for the 2010 pesticide year, from this December through November 2010, have been settled with most prices unchanged.

The talks began in the middle of June this year. The pesticide makers proposed price markups, citing as the reasons additional costs to maintain registration of their products arising from the extra safety tests required, and high prices of intermediates and ancillary materials even though the prices of crude oil had dropped since the fall season. Zen-Noh, on the other hand, said that demand for farm products was declining, depressing prices and eating into farmers’ incomes, and that it had received strong appeals from farmers to ease their overall production costs. In this context, it asked the pesticide makers to tide over their production cost increases with rationalization efforts.

As a result, the prices for about 80% of the items were kept unchanged, whose prices were cut included machine-oil and copper formulations, whose raw-material costs had gone down. The prices of some post-emergent herbicides, which had enjoyed large markups during the previous year, also were trimmed.

The prices of D-D formulations were raised. These have been in supply shortage because they are made from the byproducts of the manufacture of epoxy resins used in products like paints, whose output had been adversely affected by the economic slump. The prices of certain paddy-rice pesticides also were bumped up, to take into account higher production costs.