- Pesticides identified as Asia’s most urgent toxic exposure challenge
- Reducing pesticide use requires a gradual, farmer-friendly transition
- China offers a roadmap for cutting pesticide use through coordinated action
A new report has ranked pesticides as the top toxic chemical class after analysis showed how pesticides used on farms can pass directly into Asia’s food and water, making this the most urgent source of exposure to tackle.
Silent Threats, Global Stakes: Regional Solutions for Toxicity in Asia was published by ID Capital with support from Deep Science Ventures (DSV) and the Grantham Foundation.
“Pesticides are one of the most direct sources of toxicity entering Asia’s environment and food chain, reflecting the region’s outsized share of global agricultural output and intensive farming,” it said.
“Usage across many Asian markets remains marked by high application intensity, continued reliance on legacy or highly hazardous active ingredients, and uneven regulatory enforcement, raising persistence and bioaccumulation risk into livestock and aquaculture.”
Isabelle Decitre, founder of ID Capital, underscored the scale and urgency of tackling toxicity.
“The impact is already here, just like climate change, but the level of awareness is not there. The urgency comes from the combination of the scale, the exposure, and the cumulative risk. There’s the difficulty of managing the problem. This is like the metaphor of the boiling frog and the story of a gradual threat. It’s very easy to be complacent and fail to notice how important it is.”
Precision for future’s sake
In agriculture, Decitre urged a shift towards integrated pest management, with solutions such as biopesticides among the major tools.
However, she said there was no single solution to the problem: “Let’s be clear. There is, unfortunately, no silver bullet for this.”
As better alternatives are being developed, Decitre believes significant improvements can still be achieved through incremental measures.
Precision spraying and precision farming, for instance, reduce unnecessary pesticide use – a positive step regardless of whether farmers continue using conventional chemistries.
“Even if it doesn’t remove toxicity entirely, anything that you could call precision – precision spraying, precision farming – is already a step towards a better way of farming. This has to be done no matter what, and as much as possible at a big scale,” said Decitre.
The farmers’ dilemma
For many farmers, the challenge is not a lack of awareness about the downsides of heavy pesticide use.
Their real dilemma is balancing long-term soil health against the immediate need to protect yields and income.
Conventional chemicals offer something farmers value above all else: predictability.
Biological alternatives may promise better outcomes over time, but they often work more slowly and require new practices, creating uncertainty that many farmers cannot afford to take on.
Decitre added that biologicals are often more complex to use and their performance depends on factors such as the organism, formulation, environmental conditions, timing, and management practices.
Furthermore, farmers are being asked to bear most of the risk. Given the uncertainty already inherent in farming, it is little wonder that many farmers are reluctant to experiment with unfamiliar solutions.
To overcome this trust gap, Decitre cited an outcome-based business model she has observed, in which companies supplying biological products are compensated based on measurable outcomes such as higher yields or lower costs, reducing the risks for farmers.
She also highlighted a gradual approach that introduces biologicals to farmers in stages, starting by replacing only a small portion of chemical inputs. The aim is to progressively adopt more biological products and new practices.
Decitre said this step-by-step process helps build confidence because it reduces risk and allows trust to develop over time.
China’s pesticide playbook
While policy lays the critical foundation for change at scale, she stressed that policy must be accompanied by available alternatives.
She highlighted Europe’s experience with neonicotinoids, which saw the ban suspended because of a lack of practical substitutes.
“Banning is the end point, but if you don’t provide a better solution, you’re just making farmers poor and more destitute.”
Decitre pointed to China’s Zero Growth Action Plan for Pesticide Use by 2020 as a strong initiative that helped to halt the growth of pesticide use before reducing it.
She emphasised that China succeeded by taking an “enlightening” multi-pronged approach.
“Specifically on pesticides, they are doing quite well, and it didn’t happen by chance. Their strategy was: control, substitute, precision and professionalisation.”
Crucially, authorities did not simply call for less pesticide use. They set concrete targets, expanding biological and physical pest control across major crops through measures such as natural enemies, biological products and pheromone traps.
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” said Decitre.
China also recognised that reducing pesticide use was not solely a technology challenge, but a capability challenge.
Rather than expecting individual farmers to manage increasingly complex pest pressures on their own, the government promoted professional pest-control services.
These trained operators could identify threats, select appropriate products and avoid unnecessary applications.
China also innovated in application technology to enable more precise pesticide spraying, reducing waste and runoff.
“The rollout of drones has been a huge thing – a game changer. One of the things that made China very good at drone spraying is that drones have these nozzles that distribute small droplets. The mechanics and physics of the droplets are very important because if the droplets are too big, then you don’t spray very uniformly, or the product isn’t distributed where the plant most needs it.”
In this case, regulation was crucial to the successful rollout of drones and helped maximise their potential.
“The regulations allow the use of fairly concentrated product chemistries and biologicals, which is not the case in many other countries. As a result, if you have the nozzles right, you distribute the right dose, but you can have lighter tanks, so you have more autonomy.”
Perhaps most striking, said Decitre, was China’s investment in pest forecasting.
“The government invested in something very automated, very IoT-enabled, which I would call monitoring stations with insect traps,” she said.
With advance warning of an impending pest outbreak, authorities can alert farmers in affected areas and advise them on the appropriate response before the problem escalates.
“They don’t have to wait to see the pests in the field with their own eyes, which is usually too late. It’s really sophisticated, and it’s handling something that very few countries know how to handle well: this notion of a collective-action problem.”
Decitre acknowledged that not every aspect of the Chinese model can be replicated elsewhere but noted that its success offers a reminder that meaningful reductions in pesticide use are possible when policy, innovation and coordination work in tandem.
“Many things are not easily implementable as-is. But if we focus on the glass half full, I’m sure we can cherry-pick quite a few things that are very implementable.”
