Agrochemical fungicide market

Agrochemical fungicides with useful potency, spectrum and toxicological properties that are interesting enough for commercialization are rare. Only one compound, difiumetorim (4) (trade name pyricut) [2], has been introduced into the market in the last 15 years (Fig. 13.5.1). 

The most important natural products in use as commercial fungicides are illustrated in Figure 1. Individually, these are minor products, each with a narrow spectrum of activity and application predominantly on rice, vegetable and fruit outlets. Taken together, natural products now command less than 1% of the total fungicide market, which was estimated in 1991 to account for 21% of the 26.8 billion total for agrochemicals (i). The relative unimportance of natural products, when compared to their synthetic counterparts, can be attributed to a number of factors, including limitations in their spectrum of activity and, in certain instances, the onset of resistance. 

While commercial agrochemicals constitute the largest segment of the pesticide market, home and garden use products made a significant economic contribution to the otherwise lackluster years of 1982-3, (Fig. 6) with an estimated volume of 97M 45 fungicides, 30) ... 

Wc cannot maintain our present high density of population in the developed world, nor deal with malnutrition in the developing world unless we preserve our food supply from attacks by insects and fungi and from competition by weeds. The world market for agrochemicals is over 10 000 000 000 per annum divided roughly equally between herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides,... 

By 2010, biotechnology is likely to have significantly transformed the agrochemicals market, with fungicides the only segment likely to remain rela-... 

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 approximately 14 and 17 members of these groups on the market. 

In addition to these two products, other strobilurin fungicides are being developed by various agrochemical companies. Closest to the market are metominostrobin from Shionogi and trifloxystrobin from Novartis (Figure 1), both of which are expected to be on sale for the first time this year. 

The global crop protection market for the year 2000 was about US 32 bilhon. Herbicides accounted for about 45 percent, insecticides 22 percent, and fungicides 20 percent of worldwide sales. The top selling agrochemicals were glyphosate and paraquat as herbicides, chlorpyriphos and imidacloprid as insecticides, azoxystrobin and mancozeb as fungicides. The most important uses were on cereals (except rice) with... 

Insecticides dominate the Indian agrochemical market, with a share of about 74%. Fai mers are using more pyrethroids but the demand for organophosphates is decreasing. Herbicides and fungicides account for about 12% each and in recent years, both have been increasing their market share by about 1% annually. 

Insecticides accounted for 74% of the total agrochemical market value. Within this sector, organophosphates have 41% of the market by value, pyretliroids 20%, organochlorines 6% and carbamates 5%. Tlie remainder of the agrochemical market was represented by herbicides 14%, fungicides 9%, acaricides 2% and fumigants 1 %. 

Fluoro- and flnoroalkylpyrazole templates are also present in important agrochemicals, two examples being the marketed fungicide penthiopyrad [96] (Fig. 7a) and the insecticidal anthranilic diamide (Fig. 7b) [97]. Fnstero and co-workers prepared a small set of analogues of the commercially available acaricide tebufen-pyrad with several fluorinated side chains at the pyrazole C-3 [98]. Some of these compounds displayed higher acaricidal activity than the parent compound tebufen-pyrad (Fig. 7c). 

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