Shortage of farm labour triggered by migration and social welfare schemes such as National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is resulting in increasing usage of herbicides in the country. Also the rising labour wage component in the total cost of cultivation is aiding such a trend.

Companies including Monsanto India, Dhanuka Agritech, Excel Crop Care Ltd and state-run Hindustan Insecticides Ltd (HIL) have seen a rise in herbicide sales in the past couple of years.

“With the rising costs and labour shortage, farmers are inclined to use herbicides which are cheaper and more economical (compared to manual weeding),” said Mr M.K. Dhanuka, Managing Director, Dhanuka Agritech. The company has seen its herbicide sales almost double in the past five years and now account for a third of its overall sales. Dhanuka earns more than Rs 100 crore from Targa Super alone, a proprietary herbicide belonging to Nissan Chemicals, which it distributes in India.

The herbicide or weedicide category in India has been growing at over 15 per cent and the market size for such products is estimated at Rs 2,000 crore. Weeds are wild plants that grow on the fields and obstruct the growth of crops thereby, affecting productivity. They also consume a portion of fertilisers and water applied to the field. Weeding of such unwanted plants has largely been a manual process so far in the domestic agriculture sector.

The oft-repeated weeding is an important process of the crop cycle and accounts for a chunk of the cultivation costs. The average farm labour costs have risen by over 125 per cent in the past eight years. The popularity of rural job schemes such as NREGA has resulted in shortage of labour for the farm sector.

Monsanto India has also seen a rise in sales of Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide. “The demand is not only from farm or plantations sector, but also for non-crop use in the industrial segment,” said Mr Gyanendra Shukla, Director, Corporate Affairs at Monsanto India. Roundup is being increasingly used to contain weeds in industrial premises as the labour costs on the rise, he added.

Hindustan Insecticide Ltd has also seen a rise in its herbicide sales, which will play a major role for the company going forward, said Mr N. Ramamoorthy, General Manager for Marketing. HIL, which has a portfolio of some six-seven herbicide products including that of butachlor, has seen its revenues grow from the category by about 15 per cent on an annual basis.

The increasing proliferation of genetically modified crops such as Bt cotton has also opened up growth opportunity for the weedicide segment. For Excel Crop Care Ltd, revenues from weedicide have gone up to 25.43 per cent of its total revenue of Rs 470 crore in 2010-11. Weedicides accounted for 23.6 per cent of Excel Crop Care's revenue of Rs 403.9 crore in 2009-10.

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