An Industry Committed to Helping Farmers Grow
By Robert Hunter, Executive Director, Crop Protection, CropLife International
It is easy to understand why farmers need crop protection products when you consider that there are 30,000 weeds, 10,000 insects and 50,000 diseases competing with us for our food. In fact, without crop protection products it is estimated that 86 percent of the world’s apples, and 48 percent of carrots wouldn’t make it to market. Even with access to crop protection products many of the world’s farmers continue to lose 30–40 percent of their crops to pests and disease every year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
In the developing world, the impact of a failed crop can be devastating where a failure to bring in the harvest can leave families without an income to afford basic needs such as healthcare, education and food. Meanwhile the ability of farmers to defeat pests is becoming more difficult as changing weather patterns mean diseases and insects are migrating to parts of the world where they were previously unknown. And as the global population and pressures on land use continues to grow, farmers are required to grow more crops with less impact on the environment.
The crop protection industry employs some of the world’s leading scientific minds to develop the cutting edge innovations farmers need to deal with these great challenges. According to a new industry report put together by market experts Phillips McDougall, plant science companies must invest $286 million and more than 11 years of research to bring one single crop protection product to market. Furthermore, plant scientists will screen an average of 140,000 individual molecules to find the right one to help farmers. The impact of this research cannot be overestimated. For example in Honduras access to effective and innovative crop protection products has nearly doubled incomes and helped lift over 100,000 rural people out of poverty.
Since the year 2000, the cost of bringing a new crop protection product to market has increased by 55 percent. This is largely due to the high volume and complexity of environmental and human safety data required by regulatory bodies, making the crop protection industry one of the most highly regulated sectors in the world. These high costs demonstrate the need for predictable and risk-based regulations alongside robust intellectual property rights to give companies the confidence to bring solutions to our farmers who need to protect their crops.
I am proud to work for an industry that continues to innovate and invest in the discovery of new crop protection products that can help farmers feed our growing population. And for my farming friends and family in Canada — they think it’s pretty cool too!
