The 15th National Pesticide Communication Conference was held in Shanghai recently. The 13th Five Year Plan (FYP) was discussed animatedly during the conference.
Pesticide industry has achieved great development during the 12th FYP. Local pesticide companies concentrated greatly and companies grew fast; product structure turned to be more reasonable; pesticide preparations exportation increased and started to enter European and U.S market. But the shortcomings are still quite obvious: companies have weak creativity and technical ability; treatment on special polluted substance is backward. Ministry of Agriculture promote zero growth of pesticide application by 2020, as a result, the 13th FYP would move on the complete the tasks that have not been accomplished in the 12th FYP.
The 13th FYP will concentrate on the following four tasks:
1. Improvement on industry structure: MOA made a detailed indicator to accomplish the task. During 13th FYP, the total quantity of pesticide manufactures should decrease by 30%, and the top 20 technical material manufacturers should account for more than half of the total turnover. 50% technical material manufacturers should move to industrial park. Try to build national key large-scale enterprises with more than 100 billion sales revenues and 2-3 large-scale enterprises by 2020.
Mr. Pan Aihua, vice director of Industrial Raw Material Office of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), said to build large scale and competitive pesticide manufacture companies, government encourage powerful companies to merger and acquire small manufacturers, and stock-reform to enhance strength.
2. Enhancement of creativity and technical skills, intellectual property protection: international pesticide manufacturers would at invest more than 10% sales revenue into product R&D, but Chinese manufacturers invest even less than 1%. MOA require manufacturers to improve the R&D investment to 2% and invent more than 50 kinds of products.
3. Adjustment of product structure: domestic pesticide market is highly homogeneous and limited kinds of special fungicides lead to unreasonable product structure. In addition, highly toxic pesticides have been banned in many countries, but in China, there are still many farmers and retailers selling those dangerous and harmful products. MOA has made the highly toxic pesticides elimination plan, and more than 15 highly toxic pesticides would be banned by 2020 gradually.
Development of product structure may help pesticide products to join international competitiveness through One Belt And One Road. Mr. Pan emphasized that enterprises are encouraged to invest and build factory in those countries that have huge demand on pesticides. Currently, government and researchers are doing market research on pesticide exportation. Africa seems to have large demand of pesticide products and may be new market for enterprises.
4. Environment protection and resource conservation are considered as key task: more policies would be issued to guide manufacturers develop circular economy, improve recycle ratio, reduce polluted waste and develop waste treatment technology. Accordingly, 13th FYP demand agrichemical waste treatment should increase from 20% to 30% and by-product utilization rate should increase by 30%.
To achieve the 13th FYP target, MOA and MIIT are now analyzing and making corresponding supporting measures. The Regulations on Pesticide Administration is under amendment as well. More efforts would be made to utilize economical measurements including fiscal, price and trade part to eliminate outdated products and encourage merger and acquisition within industry. More pesticide industrial parks would be built in the following years to concentrate production and reduce environmental problems.
