Increasing human population across the world has raised demands for food productions. And this is exerting pressure on both agriculture as well as meat industries. The growing food demand has subsequntly increased demands for required input materials, like seeds, fertilizers (including pesticide and weedicides).

However, subsequent increase in weedicides use has led the pathway for many issues, such as direct chemical discharge to water resources and increased contaminations; reduced soil’s water absorption capability; negative impact on polinators’ population (including birds and bees etc.)

Challenges & concerns:

1. Resilience of weeds to the affordable weedicides.
2. Increased use of weedicides directly on soil (while sowing stage), interacts with multiple environmental factors.
   • This is done to minimize the labour cost and tackle incresed labour demands.
   • increases stress on water consumption.
3. Uneven and uncertain rainfall, dues to global climate change.

Need of better strategy

• There is a need of better sustainable policies for reduction in chemical fertilizers utilization.
• Effective management strategies for data collection in fertilizer sales & utilization.
• Evaluations of methods that can effectively optimize use of machines, chemical, and financial inputs in agriculture sector.

Statistics

References

• https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/pesticide-breakdown-by-type