Pesticide Volume Rose 53 Per Cent in a Decade and Value Rose 35. The Gap Sets the Forecast.

Between 2015 and 2024 the volume of pesticides traded internationally rose 53 per cent. The value of that trade rose 35 per cent. Both are FAO series, measured on the same trade flows over the same nine years, and the eighteen-point gap between them is the most important number in crop protection.

Because it means the average traded pesticide lost 11.8 per cent of its unit value over the decade, in current dollars, before any adjustment for inflation. In real terms it lost considerably more. More product crossed borders, and less money came back for it.

The application side tells the same story from a different angle. Global agricultural use reached 3.92 million tonnes of active ingredient in 2024, up 5 per cent in a single year and 18 per cent over the decade, applied at 2.49 kilograms per hectare of cropland. The world is using more chemistry on more land, and paying less per unit for it.

This is capacity, not demand

The mechanism is not mysterious and it is not cyclical in the way the industry likes to describe it. Chinese pesticide production capacity added during the 2021–22 shortage was never retired when the shortage ended. A producer sitting on a plant he has already built and partially depreciated does not defend price by cutting volume; he defends cash contribution by running the plant. That behaviour, repeated across dozens of producers, is a price ceiling.

China’s export data is the cleanest available confirmation. The country exported 2.303 million tonnes of pesticides worth RMB 126.83 billion in 2025 — volume up 12.2 per cent, value up 11.9 per cent. Those two numbers are within three-tenths of a point of each other, which is what a market looks like when supply is chasing demand rather than pricing it.

At the product level, 95 per cent glyphosate technical sat at RMB 26,101 per tonne at the end of November, having recovered from around RMB 24,000 in January and then rolled over again. A price that rallies on cost then fails to hold is a price with surplus behind it.

What that does to an eight-year forecast

The Global Crop Protection report sizes this market at USD 72.40 billion in 2025 rising to USD 100.00 billion in 2033, a 4.12 per cent CAGR, on 4.05 to 4.70 million tonnes of active ingredient — 1.88 per cent volume growth. That splits the decade 46 per cent tonnage and 54 per cent price and mix.

Nearly every published estimate for this market sits between 5.5 and 6.1 per cent. The difference is not caution. It is a specific bet: that the capacity structure which produced an 11.8 per cent unit-value decline over the last decade persists through the next eight years. Anyone forecasting above 5 per cent is implicitly betting that it does not — and there is no mechanism in place that would retire it. There is no cartel, no quota, no consolidation wave large enough to matter, and no regulatory barrier to a Chinese formulator selling technical material to anyone who will buy it.

The part that is genuinely counterintuitive

In the worst pricing environment in a decade, all of the largest crop protection businesses held or improved margin. Bayer Crop Science held a 19.4 per cent core crop protection margin. BASF made 7.4 per cent more EBITDA on 2.2 per cent less revenue. Corteva’s crop protection EBITDA rose 6 per cent with margin up 70 basis points.

Operations are fine. What broke is the valuation premise. Bayer booked EUR 5,773 million of special items against EUR 4,188 million of underlying EBITDA in the division — a write-down that says the assets were bought on an assumption about pricing power that the market has since contradicted. The distinction matters for anyone reading this as a distressed industry: it is not. It is a profitable industry in a deflating product category whose balance sheets were struck at the wrong multiple.

The sentence to take away

Crop protection is not becoming less useful. It is becoming less expensive, at roughly 1.3 per cent a year in traded unit value, and the volume response is larger than the price response. That is why the tonnage series in this report grows 1.88 per cent while the value series grows 4.12 per cent — the gap is mix and new chemistry, not pricing power.

Anyone modelling this market off revenue growth alone will over-forecast it by roughly a fifth. The volume is the constraint on price, and the volume is structural.