Farmers’ organisations in Kalpitiya area have informed the Agriculture Minister Mahinda Amaraweera that the same pesticide is being sold at a higher price using different names.
Accordingly, the Agriculture Minister instructed the Pesticides Registrar to immediately regulate the sale of the same pesticide under different names at higher prices.
Farmers presented this problem to the Minister when they met the representatives of farmers’ organisations in Norochcholai and Kalpitiya recently.
When naming pesticides, 75 percent of the name included in herbicides and insecticides should include the chemical name contained in it. But the farmers said that the names contained in the pesticides sold in some areas are not the same, and even if many pesticides are applied to the crops, the proper results are not obtained.
However, the information about such pesticides should be immediately given to the Agriculture Department, the Agricultural Development Department, Agriculture Ministry or the Pesticides Registrar’s Office, and that the law will be enforced against the institutions and individuals who sell and distribute substandard insecticides and herbicides, and those companies should be registered.
The Minister also instructed the Agricultural Development Department to make arrangements to sell pesticides through the entire Farmers’ Public Service Centres this season.
The Minister asked the Commissioner General of Agrarian Service H.M.A.L. Abeyrathne to keep 2 percent of the 20 percent discount given by the respective production companies to the pesticide sales representative as operational cost to the Agrarian Development Department and take steps to give the remaining 18 percent discount to the farmers as a relief.
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