Asia loses market share, Europe sells more agrochemicals to Brazil in 2020

By Leonardo Gottems, Reporter for AgroPages

The import of agrochemicals from the Asian continent lost its market share in Brazil, with a decrease of 40% of the products purchased from China in this first quarter of 2020. 

On the other hand, European exports to Brazil continued to expand, according to data from Secex (Secretariat of Foreign Trade) of the Brazilian government.

From January to April, Brazil bought a total of US$590 million in insecticides, herbicides and fungicides. In volume, Brazilian acquisitions of pesticides abroad amounted to 64,000 tons between January and April this year, a decrease of 16% in comparison with the same period last year.

In 2019, Brazilian imports totalled a record 335,000 tons of agrochemicals. For this volume, Brazilian buyers disbursed $3 billion, less than that in 2014, when $3.4 billion was spent, mainly on insecticides, to control the new arrival, Helicoverpa armigera.

China and India were the two countries that sold most of the pesticides to Brazil last year. In the first four months of 2020, however, sales from these Asian giants fell to $199 million, which represented a 28% drop. The main low was China, which exported only $69 million to Brazilians, a 40% decrease compared to the same period in 2019.

According to industry experts, two factors were responsible for China losing so much participation in Brazil's crop protection product market. The first was the closure of several industries that had to adapt to the country's new environmental rules. Earlier this year, the Chinese were the first country to suffer an industrial shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In contrast, Europe increased its sales to $102 million, an increase of 10% from the first four-month period of 2020. The European countries that registered the maximum sales to Brazil this year were Germany, France, Spain and the United Kingdom. For its part, the United States, kept the value of its sales stable to Brazil this year at $154 million.