Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
B.
FUTURE TRENDS
Rapid advances in the field of biotechnology will lead to novel microbial
products and new crop varieties. These new microbial products will become
increasingly important crop protection agents and should gradually replace
agrochemicals. However, these new methods are not likely to take more than
5% of the crop protection market by the year 2000. In the next 20 years, rapid
progress is expected and numerous microbial products and resistant crop
varieties are expected to reach the marketplace. The current expectations are
that the long-term growth potential for the agrochemicals industry will be
approximately 2% per annum in real terms, but higher (5%) in the less devel-
oped countries.
Agrochemicals are becoming more potent in terms of the dose required
(grams per hectare rather than kilograms per hectare) to control the pest. This
efficiency of modern agrochemicals in controlling their target organisms and
the resultant increase in crop yields is well illustrated by two examples. The
yield of cotton in the United States, after treatment with cypermethrin against
cotton bollworm, was 402 kg/ha, whereas the untreated crop yielded of 67
kg/ha. The yield of wheat which had been treated with the herbicide diclofop-
methyl against infestation by wild oats was 366 g/m
2
, whereas the yield was
143 g/m
2
for untreated wheat.
The greater efficiency of modern agricultural practice liberates land that
can be used for recreational purposes; in the United States in 1983, sufficient
food was produced from 117 ha, whereas in 1950 the production of the same
quantity of food required 243 ha.
In countries like the United States, the development of a pesticide from
initial discovery in the laboratory to marketing takes at least eight years. The
costs of development have substantially increased; in 1964 the cost was $2.9
million, but by 1987 it had risen to $50 million due to increasingly stringent
environmental and toxicological tests required by the EPA.
It is also becoming increasingly difficult to discover a new agrochemical
product with significant advantages over existing products. Consequently, the
number of compounds which need to be screened to obtain one marketable
product has substantially increased, from one in 3,600 in 1964, to one in
16,000 in 1985, and in 1989 was estimated to be one in 20,000. There has
been an overall decline in the profitability of the agrochemical industry, from
11.5 % (1981) to 7.9 % (1986); this is illustrated by the fact that all the 10
major agrochemicals used in the United States in 1987 were introduced prior to
1976, namely glyphosate (1972), alachlor (1966), metribuzin (1971), carbaryl
(1956), chlorpyrifos (1965), carbofuran (1967), chlorothalonil (1963),
trifluralin (1963), bentazone (1975), and dicamba (1965).
