ABSTRACT
The units used to record pesticide production, distribution and use have been expressed in many different ways — in monetary terms (usually US$), total area treated, the rate of use per hectare, the proportion of total crop area treated, the total amount of active ingredient (usually tons). A financial unit, generally US$, is used by the agrochemical industry and government agencies to describe production and trading statistics, facilitating comparisons among different sets of statistics. The number of hectares of crop receiving a pesticide treatment gives little useful information about pesticide usage. The methods of measuring pesticide production and use described have been widely used at the regional, national and company levels. They have also been employed at the farm level where pesticide use is described in terms of money spent per hectare for financial analyses, or in terms of physical quantities of active ingredient, or area treated for a chemical or biological analysis.
