Currently, Indian companies producing agrochemicals are increasingly asking the authorities to protect them from competing imports.
This month, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman received an appeal from the association of Indian agrochemical producers, the Crop Care Federation.
Businessmen are asking for an urgent increase in duties on the import of agrochemicals and other similar products into the country. The reason is simple: local businesses cannot withstand the competition.
The import of agrochemicals into India is steadily growing. For example, over the past 5 years, it has grown by 50%.
As a result, Indian manufacturers are often simply unable to compete with the products of transnational corporations, since in some cases they are cheaper.
All this leads to rather sad consequences: about half of the capacities that Indian businesses have are currently simply idle.
At the same time, Indian businesses note that the government is not doing enough to protect local producers, thereby contradicting its own policy of promoting the slogan «Made in India».
At the same time, it should be noted that Indian companies producing agrochemicals occupy a leading position in the world market.
For example, India produces up to 85% of all generic pesticides, and in terms of export volumes, it is in second place in the world, even ahead of the United States.
However, domestic production may begin to stall if the import of raw materials and technology remains as uncontrolled, experts note.
In addition, such imports bring additional problems.
For example, they do not create additional jobs, and quality control is often impossible. As a result, it is possible that goods imported into the country will contain low-quality materials that may be toxic.
In general, the Crop Care Federation of India believes that the country has achieved a lot in this industry, and its companies can successfully produce and even export almost everything that agricultural producers need.
In such a situation, imports are completely unnecessary, so they need to be limited as much as possible.
And this is not to mention the fact that significant use of fertilizer imports causes an outflow of foreign currency from the country, which is absolutely necessary for the purchase of some other goods.
Whether the authorities will want to solve this problem and what measures they are going to take is still unknown.
