By Leonardo Gottems, reporter for Agropages
According to the Brazilian Association of Generic Pesticides (Aenda), generic pesticides are losing market share for products called specialties. According to the entity, this occurs due to the “extraordinary power” of the largest companies in the sector that managed to revert the prevalence of sales that the post-patent products registered in previous years and recovered two percentage points in the comparison between the 2016 and 2015 market share.
“In the value of ton per product, the specialties always had very superior numbers, exactly due to the lack of competitiveness in this sector and the opportunity of sales at higher prices and with more compensating margins from the negotiation point of view,” said the executive-director of the Association, agronomist Tulio Teixeira de Oliveira.
Oliveira reminded that on the other hand, in terms of quantity sold per year, the generic reached a peak in 2013. When that occurred, according to him, due to the amplification of genetic products as a fruit of registration by equivalence adopted by the government in the first decade of the current century, “after a huge effort of Aenda”. “Little by little, nevertheless, the generic products were incorporated into the menus of big companies in a way that they gave a “go away” to smaller competitors and started to occupy a larger slice of this sector too. Having done this, they started to manage the sales of both sectors,” said Oliveira.
Oliveira denied that the appearance of resistant plagues would have provoked a decline in the use of some generic products and a faster application of new products. He also did not point out smuggling as a big villain of the story, excluding from statistics several tons of genetic products.
He admited that, on the other hand, there are large companies that maintain research centers to develop new molecules, new technologies, innovation on plague management and diffusion in the rural field, training the farmers to improve productivity, taking more production from the same piece of land.
Finally, the Aenda director questioned the Cooperative System could create a new model, more adequate socially. “So far, we can only complain about the long line of requests of generic products that the government keeps saying does not have enough personnel to examine. Is that true? A simple dossier, do you need so many people?” the director asked.