2013 Global Pesticide Registration Watch—Herbicides,Biopesticides and Others

According to the incomplete statistics of AgroPages, there were 93 approved pesticide registrations worldwide in 2013 including 77 single agent products and 16 mixture products. Fungicide holds the largest number of registrations with 27 registrations, followed by bio-pesticides with 22 registrations, insecticide with 21 registrations, herbicide with 15 registrations, plant regulator with 5 registrations, acaricide with 2 registrations and fumigant with 1 registration. The main proportion of registrations goes to multinationals, where BASF holds the largest number up to 9 registrations, followed by Syngenta, Bayer CropScience and Dow AgroSciences with 7 registrations each, as well as DuPont with 6 registrations.

Multinationals have continued to apply for registration of their newly developed products and best-seller products over recent years, such as the azoxystrobin and mandipropamid of Syngenta, fluopyram and bixafen of Bayer CropScience, fluxapyroxad and ether benzene sulfonamide of BASF, picoxystrobin and yantraniliprole of DuPont, spinetoram and sulfoxaflor of Dow AgroSciences. Quite a lot of these varieties have individually exceeded sales of USD 100 million or even 1 billion; most of the registrations took place in Europe and US with extended application scope.

Fungicide is of the largest number of new varieties; herbicide is of mainly long-existing varieties with more mixture products. Some multinationals have reduced registration of insecticide, as may be caused by EU’s restricted use of neonicotinoid insecticide in 2013, which is a big impact to Syngenta and Bayer CropScience. Syngenta claimed that EU’s 2-year prohibited use of their thiamethoxam products will lead to a loss of sales volume of USD75 million. Bio-pesticides registrations have increased significantly as compared with the 9 registrations of 2012, attributable to the fast growth of bio-pesticides over the last 2 years, which is 3 times the growth rate of the conventional pesticide. As the market demand for bio-pesticides is growing and the toxicity of bio-pesticides is low, so the requirement on registration of bio-pesticides is more relaxed and can be approved relatively faster also at lower expense, being the reason why there have been blowout bio-pesticides registrations over the last 2 years. Syngenta and Bayer CropScience have respectively obtained 1 bio-pesticides registration in 2013 after the merger with bio-pesticides companies in 2012. It is foreseeable that in the years ahead the multinationals who have acquired bio-pesticides companies are surely going to enhance the development, registration and promotion of bio-pesticides in order to capture more market share of bio-pesticides most probably the European and US market, where pesticide supervision is more stringent, volume of application is higher and awareness of food safety is stronger.

Moreover, bio-pesticides registration has a distinctive feature compared with usual pesticide registration. In this sector, multinationals can no longer outshine others, instead many small scale but very characteristic industry players have emerged. For example, the Marrone Bio Innovations (MBI), which was founded in 2006, achieving sales of only USD7 million in 2012, is striving to become a world largest bio-pesticides-dedicated enterprise as supported by its strong R&D capacity and the fast growing market. Due to its confidence in the future prospects of bio-pesticides industry, MBI expects to achieve sales of USD250 million by 2015.

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