Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
A new agrochemical will only be developed today only if it is effective in pro-
tecting one or more of the following major world crops: corn, rice, soyabeans,
cotton, wheat, or oilseed rape. Research and development is nowcoordinated
very closely with marketing to ascertain if this activity will ensurea suffi-
ciently large potential market to justify the development costs.
Agrochemicals today are a very high risk business because the substantial
sum of approximately $50 million spent on development during the first eight
years must be recovered quickly, since the life of the patent expires after 20
years. Then other companies who did not bear the high development costs can
manufacture the product and sell it, often at a lower price and at a higher
profit.
The agrochemicals industry today is much more complex. In order to
protect the environment and consumers from dangerous agrochemicals, the
standards demanded for approval and registration of products have become
much more rigorous. To satisfy the criteria may involve the company's
expenditure of some $5 million.
Worldwide, even in developed countries, many of the pesticides discovered
in the 1950s are still extensively used. There is urgent need for the
introduction of more selective agrochemicals, particularly with different modes
of action to combat the growing problems presented by resistant fungi and
insects. There is a real danger that excessive emphasis on potential
environmental hazards, especially in the United States, may result in the
elimination of valuable agrochemicals and stifle the development of promising
compounds due to overregulation. Such factors have caused a massive increase
in the development costs of a new pesticide and for a time caused a reduction
in the number of significant new products coming onto the market. The
maximum number of new compounds were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s
with some 18 per annum, but declined to six in the 1970s.
Random screening has become less successful; consequently there has
been more research, with greater resources being concentrated on areas of
chemistry of proven biological activity. This approach, coupled with
increasing use of computer graphics to provide a three-dimensional model of
the active sites, has been quite successful, and the number of new compounds
coming onto the market has increased.
This approach has inevitably led to a clustering of new agrochemicals in
certain areas, such as the triazole fungicides and synthetic pyrethroids which
were launched in 1976 and 1977, respectively. In 1988 there were approxi-
mately 14 and 17 members of these groups on the market.
