Generic, growing, green?: The changing political economy of the global pesticide complex

ABSTRACT

Agriculture is now more dependent on pesticides than ever. The value of global pesticide imports increased 3x faster in the 2000s than in the 1990s. Structural transformations in the industry – including reduced innovation, increased regulatory costs, consolidation, and a dramatic shift to generic pesticides largely produced in China – have shifted prices, supply chains and formulations. The ‘supermarket revolution’, migration, and rising labor costs are driving an increase in demand. The result is a pesticide complex that is multipolar, where commodity chains and environmental impacts are less legible, requiring a hard look at the chemical nature of agrarian capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Pesticides
• political economy
• agrarian change

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude for excellent conversations and feedback from Andrew Bartlett, Adam Romero, Nathan Sayre, Christina Schiavoni, Becky Mansfield, Marion Werner, Christian Berndt and the Sustainable Food Systems Science Initiative writing workshop at Indiana University. All errors and omissions are of course mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Global pesticide sales are highly correlated with use (R² = .90), suggesting that in the absence of accurate global publicly available use data, the value of sales provides a quantitatively useful if imperfect proxy (see Web Figure 1, Supporting Information, Bernhardt, Rosi, and Gessner 2017). With the rise of domestic production of active ingredients in China and India, this is less likely to be accurate for those countries.

2 It is also important to note that increasing values and quantities of pesticide does not, by itself give much information on changes in environmental or health impacts. Increases in the amount of active ingredients applied can in some cases indicate a switch from compounds active at low doses to ones that require higher volumes to have the same effect (Kniss 2017). And innovation in the industry has produced a shift towards products that are less acutely toxic to humans. This means that even with growing pesticide applications, the total acute toxicity of chemical agriculture can decline. For example, since 1990, in the United States herbicide use has grown for every major commodity crop; but the total acute hazard quotient fell for all but one (Kniss 2017). In the U.S., much of the reduced chronic and acute hazard quotient for herbicide is due to the replacement of more acutely toxic herbicides with glyphosate (Kniss 2017). Though not acutely toxic, glyphosate is the subject of significant controversy over its long term cancer risks (Samet 2015). It is worth noting that the long-term health and environmental hazards of a chemical and acute toxicity have no inherent relation – a chemical like atrazine can have low acute toxicity and present long-term health hazards, or in the case of paraquat, may be severely acutely toxic, and have lower or more uncertain long-term health impacts. It is also possible for the volumes of pesticide to decline and the environmental impact to grow. For example, pesticide use in Britain fell by 50% from 1990 to 2015, but because of a switch to neonicotinoids and more frequent applications, the danger to honeybees increased (Goulson, Thompson, and Croombs 2018). In the absence of better, more reliable, more detailed data, raw amounts of pesticide and trade values are all there is to go on in most countries.

3 The actual market concentration may be somewhat smaller as each company has had to divest of a small portion of their businesses to gain regulatory approval. For example ChemChina had to sell its US generic paraquat business to a California company to gain FTC approval for the merger in the Unites States (FTC 2017).

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Annie Shattuck

Annie Shattuck is an Assistant Professor in Geography at Indiana University. Her work spans food politics, agroecology, rural health, agrarian change, and social movements. She is a long-time activist for agrarian and environmental justice, and worked with Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy for more than a decade. She co-edited the recent book: Food Sovereignty: Concept, Practice and Social Movements.