Faridabad, November 20

Millions of unsuspecting Indian farmers are spraying fake pesticides onto their fields, contaminating soil, cutting crop yields and putting both food security and human health at risk in the country of 1.25 billion people.

The use of spurious pesticides has exacerbated losses in the genetically modified (GM) cotton crop in northern India after an attack by whitefly, a pest, say officials. If unchecked, some of India’s roughly $26 billion in annual farm exports could be hit.

Made secretly and given names that sometimes resemble the original, counterfeits account for up to 30 per cent of the $4 billion pesticide market, according to a government-endorsed study.

And they are gaining market share in what is the world’s number four pesticide maker and sixth biggest exporter.

Influential dealers in small towns peddle high-margin fake products to gullible farmers, in turn hurting established firms like Syngenta, Bayer CropScience, DuPont, BASF, PI Industries and Rallis India.

“We are illiterate farmers; we seek advice from the vendor and just spray on the crop,” said Harbans Singh, a farmer in Punjab’s Bathinda region, whose three-acre (1.2-hectare) GM cotton crop was damaged by whitefly this year.

“It’s a double loss when you see the crop wilting away and your money is spent on pesticides that don’t work.”

But SN Sushil, who heads India’s top pesticide testing laboratory in Faridabad, near Delhi, said farmers panic at the first sight of a pest attack.

As a result, they overuse chemicals, reducing their effectiveness and raising costs.

Sushil’s team worked overtime after Punjab sent nearly 1,000 samples of suspect pesticides following the white fly outbreak, finding some to be falsely labelled.

Indian officials tested nearly 50,000 pesticide samples last fiscal year, finding around three per cent of them ‘misbranded’, Sushil said.

He added the government was increasing inspections and looking to increase penalties, including jail terms of up to 10 years.

Lax laws, which punish by revoking licences or imposing short jail terms for offenders, and staffing shortages compromise efforts to track and seize substandard products.

Toxic pesticides that are banned abroad continue, meanwhile, to be sold freely in India.

India still permits the use of monocrotophos, a pesticide blamed for the death of 23 children in Bihar in 2013 after they ate contaminated free school lunches. That tragedy prompted the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations to advise developing countries to phase out such chemicals.

“Use of excessive pesticides has been a cause for concern for quite some time,” said Shyam Khadka, FAO’s India representative. “Now if they turn out to be spurious it’s a cause for even greater worry.”

Chronic exposure to pesticides can lead to depression, a factor in suicides, he said. Pesticides can also cause cancer.

In recent years, EU and Saudi Arabia temporarily stopped buying some vegetables from India after finding pesticide residues in produce. Indian officials say such cases result from the overuse of chemicals.

India’s fake pesticide industry is expanding at 20 per cent per year while the overall market is growing at 12 per cent.

PK Chakrabarty, an assistant director general of Indian Council of Agricultural Research, said illegal chemicals are imported ‘under the garb of good material’, and there was a ‘definite risk’ of some fake pesticides being exported from India, although there was no evidence yet.