China experiencing shortage of minor crop pesticides

 

According to the provisions, the use of pesticide must strictly observe the range of application as marked on the label and shall not go beyond the scope of use as stipulated.

 

However, due to the existence of a large variety of minor crops in China, which are also quite decentralized, pesticide manufacturers would mostly focus on the registration of major crops for reasons, such as profitability consideration, and there is almost no availability of registered pesticides for applications to minor crops.

 

According to China Pesticide Registration Watch, most of the pesticides registered in China are used in field crops and large area economic crops. There have been 32,700 registrations for applications to 10 kinds of crops—rice, cotton, wheat, citrus, apple, corn, sugarcane, peanut, rape and cucumber, accounting for 67 percent of the total number of pesticide registrations. On the other hand, there have been zero registrations for dragon fruit, passion fruit, taro and Chinese potato. 

 

It is very common that during production, growers may use pesticide beyond the range of application, as based on their own experiences since they have no choice. However, the risk of use beyond the scope of service should not be ignored, which concerns the safety of crop and food.

 

Over the recent years, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture has been working on the establishment of a long-term minor crop pesticide registration mechanism to encourage registration for application to minor crops. To this end, the ministry has successively issued several policies to expedite a green channel for the registration of featured minor crop pesticides, where the assessment and endorsement of the pesticide effect and residual data from combined tests are conducted speedily in a centralized manner to support accelerated registrations of featured minor crop pesticides.

 

At present, preferential policies for minor crop pesticide registration have been issued in the Shandong and Zhejiang provinces. In the Shandong Province, incentives were put in place at an earlier date to encourage minor crop pesticide registration, where registering fee and registering timing for extended scope of use are reduced.

 

In Zhejiang Province, a financial subsidy system was already established in 2012 as a support to minor crop pesticide registration, so far a total of Yuan22 million has been spent on 127 pesticide trials in favor of 32 manufacturers. It is expected that 200 pesticide registrations will be newly added in the Zhejiang Province by 2020.