How Can China's Pesticide Exports Transform from Scale Expansion to Value Leap?
China is a major participant in the global pesticide manufacturing and supply system, having formed a complete industrial chain ranging from basic raw materials, specialty intermediates, technical materials (active ingredients), and formulations to equipment, packaging, and technical services. As export volumes continue to expand, pesticide exports have an increasingly significant impact on capacity absorption, business operations, and global crop protection supply. According to statistics, China's pesticide exports reached nearly USD 18 billion in 2025, with strong advantages in export volume and market share. However, the scale advantage has not translated proportionally into value advantage; enterprises generally face the structural contradiction of "having orders but low profits" and "products made in China but value captured abroad."
China's current pesticide management system is fundamentally aimed at safeguarding domestic agricultural production, quality and safety of agricultural products, the ecological environment, and human and livestock health. As the export share rises, the regulatory system must also address multiple difficult issues such as export facilitation, quality credibility, registration in destination countries, international standards, cross-departmental policies, and fulfillment of international obligations. Announcement No. 1020 issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in May 2026 optimized the registration system for pesticides used exclusively outside China, providing greater space for developing products based on overseas demand and expanding formulation exports; the concentrated rectification campaign against illegal production, illegal sales, and illegal adulteration of banned and restricted pesticides (the "Three Illegals") launched the same year further emphasized strict prevention at the source, strict supervision of the process, and severe punishment of consequences. This indicates that pesticide export governance is shifting from merely "permitting exports" to "attaching equal importance to facilitation and high quality."
Based on industry research, enterprise symposiums, and conference discussions, the following analyzes the main constraints on pesticide export transformation from three levels—export value distribution, institutional balance, and industrial organization—and proposes implementation paths for both enterprises and policy.
The outstanding characteristic of China's pesticide exports is strong industrial chain supply capacity but insufficient value chain distribution capacity. Taking the world's major pesticide markets as an example, Chinese pesticide products hold a market share of nearly 60%, but capture only about 25% of the value; the physical share is clearly higher than the corresponding market value share. The main reason for this gap lies not in manufacturing itself, but in destination-country registration, branding, channels, application technology, end-user services, financing, and risk bearing.
Under the traditional B2B model, Chinese companies mostly enter the market with technical materials, generic formulations, or contract processing, which are price-transparent and highly substitutable, while importers and registration holders control customer and end-user data and can therefore capture higher channel profits and brand premiums. Even when export tax rebates, raw material costs, or exchange rates change, suppliers lacking registration and channel control are often forced to give up policy gains through price cuts. Thus, expanding export volume does not necessarily improve industry profits.
China holds a high share of global supply in certain pesticide technical materials and intermediates; adjustments in tax, environmental, registration, and production licensing policies will change the relative costs of technical materials versus formulations, and through trade transmission affect the operating rates and procurement structures of overseas formulation companies. If policies for technical materials, intermediates, and formulations are not synchronized, inversions may occur such as "formulation prices lower than the comprehensive cost of overseas companies processing with Chinese technical materials," which may in turn push overseas companies to directly import Chinese formulations or reorganize local production. Therefore, pesticide industrial policy should not only assess static domestic impacts, but should also evaluate global supply elasticity, alternative production locations, upstream-downstream tax policy differences, overseas processing capacity, and responses of major importing countries. The stronger the policy spillover effects, the greater the need for cross-departmental whole-industry-chain impact assessment.
China's pesticide exports still have room for growth, but the industry's more urgent task is to raise per-unit export value and profit retention rates. In the future, export quality should be evaluated not only by export value and volume, but also by indicators such as formulation share, own-registration coverage, own-brand revenue, channel control, compliance incident rate, customer concentration, collection cycles, and profit margins. This means export work must be upgraded from "selling products out" to "entering markets with stable quality, gaining access through registration, creating demand through services, building repeat purchases through brands, and proving value through standards." Scale is the foundation; value capture is the core of the transformation.
EX registration—that is, "pesticide registration for exclusive use outside China"—must neither be distorted into a copy of domestic PD registration (China's formal pesticide registration) nor degenerate into a customs clearance stamp without substantive review. Domestic PD registration directly concerns China's agricultural production, food chain, and ecological environment, requiring complete evaluation of safety, efficacy, and quality; EX registration mainly confirms the compliance conditions for domestic production and export, while registration in the destination country remains the final market access.
Announcement No. 1020 (2026) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the "Provisions on the Administration of Pesticide Registration for Exclusive Use outside China," allows products whose active ingredients have not obtained domestic registration to apply for EX registration if conditions are met, and no longer restricts formulations of already-registered active ingredients by domestic content, ratio, or number of active ingredients, while retaining requirements such as proof of permitted use abroad, product chemical and toxicological data, production licenses, and commitments not to sell or use the product domestically. This design embodies the principles of "moderate review, clear purpose, and risk isolation"; implementation should focus on stabilizing rules, improving review efficiency, and strengthening post-approval traceability, rather than swinging repeatedly between "total liberalization" and "total strictness."
Mature markets usually have registration verification, import inspection, and market sampling capabilities, while low-capacity markets may be unable to identify whether imported products match registered products. As a major pesticide producer, if China shifts all responsibility to importing countries, counterfeit and substandard products may exploit regulatory differences to enter the market; but imposing high-intensity pre-shipment inspection on all exports would significantly increase compliance costs and clearance times.
The reasonable model should be risk-based grading: increasing sampling intensity for countries with high complaint rates, low regulatory capacity markets, enterprises with a history of problems, high-risk varieties, and abnormally priced orders; implementing facilitation for enterprises with good credit, stable destination countries, and traceable supply chains. Agricultural and rural authorities are responsible for registration, licensing, production-side supervision, and review of the legality of exported products; customs is responsible for product quality sampling and port inspection; industry associations and enterprises undertake quality commitments, traceability, and feedback on adverse events abroad, forming a closed loop.
China's pesticide regulatory resources have long been concentrated on domestic safety evaluation and market supervision, with relatively limited export service capacity. As the export proportion rises, enterprises' demand for destination-country regulations, registration dossiers, mutual recognition of test data, official certificates, market risk information, and international standards is growing rapidly. If public service capacity cannot improve in step, enterprises can only redundantly build overseas research teams, resulting in high costs and fragmented information.