Brazil’s Pesticide Filings Reveal Deepening Reliance on Chinese Technical Imports
07 September 2026, São Paulo: A new academic analysis of Brazil’s official pesticide regulatory filings has found that the vast majority of what regulators log as new agrochemical approvals are in fact administrative expansions of products already on the market, and that Chinese manufacturers overwhelmingly dominate the foreign technical-grade sources being added. The findings, published this week, are based on a review of seven Acts issued by Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, known as MAPA, between roughly April and September 2026.
The analysis was conducted by Marcos Pędłowski, an associate professor at the State University of Northern Rio de Janeiro who holds a master’s degree in geography from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a doctorate in environmental design from Virginia Tech. Working from the official Acts as published in Brazil’s federal gazette, he tracked close to 1,000 post-registration items across the seven documents in under five months. In the most recent of those, Act No. 53, dated September 1, 2026, he counted 199 individual decisions, of which roughly 70 percent, or 139 decisions, involved expanding an already-registered product rather than approving a genuinely new one. That included 53 new authorizations for importers and 35 additions of new formulators to existing registrations.
Within the broader set of manufacturer and formulator additions, roughly 186 separate inclusions were identified, and about 130 of them named industrial facilities located in China, compared with only around 12 pointing to Indian facilities. That puts China’s share of identifiable foreign manufacturing sources being added to Brazilian pesticide registrations at close to 88 percent. The Chinese facilities named are concentrated in Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei, Anhui, Zhejiang, Hubei, and Jiangxi provinces, while the smaller Indian presence is centered on the Gujarat industrial hubs of Bharuch, Ankleshwar, Panoli, and Dahej.
The analysis also flagged specific molecules moving through this post-registration channel that have already lost their approval in the European Union. Chlorpyrifos, whose EU approval lapsed in 2020 over neurodevelopmental toxicity concerns, gained a new Brazilian import authorization from a Chinese technical source under one of the reviewed Acts. Propiconazole, an EU-approved use that expired in 2018, similarly picked up a new registered technical source. Other active ingredients that recurred frequently across the broader dataset of nearly 1,000 items included chlorantraniliprole, lactofen, and bifenthrin.
The distinction matters because Brazil’s post-registration process, which covers changes such as adding manufacturers, authorizing new importers, incorporating additional technical-grade sources, transferring registration ownership, and expanding label uses to new crops or target pests, operates with far less public visibility than the approval of a brand-new active ingredient. MAPA’s own annual tally of new agrotoxico and bioinsumo registrations for 2025, released earlier this year, showed registrations climbing, but the new analysis argues that headline figure captures only a fraction of the regulatory activity actually reshaping the market, since most of the growth is occurring through these less-scrutinized post-registration channels rather than through fresh registrations subject to the fuller review and consultation process.
Brazil remains the largest single pesticide market in the world by sales volume, and its technical-grade active ingredient supply chain has grown steadily more dependent on Chinese production capacity over the past decade as China’s own manufacturers exited lower-margin generic chemistries domestically in favor of exports. That dependence carries direct consequences for Brazilian farm input costs and availability. Any disruption to Chinese output, whether from environmental enforcement actions, energy costs, export tax changes, or logistics bottlenecks, now has an outsized ability to ripple through to the world’s top soybean and corn exporter. The continued circulation of molecules like chlorpyrifos and propiconazole in Brazil well after their EU exit also underscores a widening regulatory divergence between Europe and major exporting nations in South America, a gap that international buyers, food companies setting sustainability sourcing standards, and competing suppliers in India and elsewhere will be watching closely as they assess their own market positioning against increasingly China-centric supply chains.
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