Beyond the Synthetic Load: How Biopesticides Are Helping Latin American Farmers Meet Global Residue Standards
- communications1564
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
For farmers growing export crops across Latin America and the Caribbean, few obstacles are as quietly costly as a shipment turned back at the border because pesticide residues exceeded a trading partner's limit. It's a problem that touches everything from a smallholder's livelihood to a country's standing in international markets — and it's the subject of the latest episode of SAN's AgroTalk series.
In this session, Scaling Impact with Biopesticides, we sat down with two experts who have spent the past several years working on exactly this challenge: Carlos Angel, lead consultant at IICA and founder of Luma 360 Consulting, and Yelitza Colmenarez, CABI's Latin America Regional Director.
An 11-country experiment in integrated management
Carlos opens the conversation with results from a multi-year, STDF-funded project spanning 11 countries — from the Dominican Republic to Argentina — that set out to answer a deceptively simple question: can swapping a conventional pesticide's final pre-harvest application for a biopesticide actually work at scale?
He walks through how national teams — many of them regulatory agencies not typically involved in field research — were trained to design and run their own residue-decline trials on minor crops like chili pepper, banana, and passion fruit. Along the way, he shares what happened when trials didn't go as planned, what the data revealed about compliance with international residue limits, and why registration gaps remain one of the most stubborn barriers farmers face — even when a safer alternative exists.
He also previews the practical output of all that research: a library of more than 270 training, extension, and communication materials, built for audiences ranging from smallholder farmers to regulatory officials, and produced across two languages.
What comes next with biopesticides
Where Carlos looks back at what was tested, Yelitza looks ahead. Drawing on CABI's work through global initiatives like PlantwisePlus, she makes the case for why reducing dependence on highly toxic pesticides has to be approached phase by phase — and why farmer adoption, not just technical availability, is the real bottleneck to solve for.
She shares a candid finding from CABI's own fieldwork: in countries with a genuinely strong portfolio of biopesticides already registered and available, farmer awareness of what's actually on the market can still be surprisingly low. That gap — between what exists and what farmers know exists — shapes much of her thinking on what a second phase of this work should prioritize, from stronger tracking of on-the-ground adoption to closing the information gap between the public and private sectors.
The session closes with a short testimonial from farmers and technicians who've been living this work in the field.
Watch the full episode
If you work in phytosanitary regulation, agricultural extension, sustainable sourcing, or export compliance, this conversation offers a grounded look at what it actually takes to move biopesticides from pilot to practice — including the technical hurdles, the regulatory friction, and the open questions still shaping where this work goes next.
AgroTalk is SAN's ongoing conversation series connecting member organizations, technical experts, and practitioners working on sustainable agriculture across the network's 135+ countries. Catch past episodes on our YouTube channel.
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