Latin America’s Pesticide Market: Where Registration Is Getting Easier - and Harder

For a supplier deciding where to register a new active ingredient in Latin America, "the region" has become less useful as a unit of analysis than it used to be. Over the past two to three years, regulatory activity across the continent's major agricultural markets has pulled national systems in different, sometimes opposite, directions. Brazil is tightening the rules around its most hazardous chemistries even as it approves registrations at a record pace. Mexico is doing something similar in its own way — banning dozens of older molecules while simultaneously stripping bureaucracy out of the registration process itself. Argentina, Uruguay and Panama have leaned toward simplification and regulatory convergence. In the Andean countries, a shared regional framework has produced anything but uniform results on the ground.

None of this fits neatly into a single narrative of the region "opening up" or "clamping down." It looks more like several regulatory philosophies operating in parallel, each shaped by domestic politics, institutional capacity and the international commitments individual countries have separately signed onto. For companies operating across borders, the practical consequence is that a registration strategy built for one market rarely transfers cleanly to the next — and that keeping track of where each country currently sits has become, in itself, a competitive skill.

Speed and Regulatory Convergence

The clearest simplification story of the past two years has come from Mexico. In late October 2025, health regulator COFEPRIS published a modernization of its pesticide registration rules.1 The reform consolidated several categories of registration, unified the so-called Homoclave coding system used to track products through the approval process, and — on paper, at least — shortened the administrative processing times applicants can expect. For an agency long associated with slow-moving paperwork, that alone was notable, and it landed alongside a separate, far less forgiving move described below.

Argentina has moved in a similar direction, using a different mechanism. Since mid-2025, SENASA has expanded the use of sworn declarations and introduced simplified pathways for products originating in countries deemed to have regulatory convergence with Argentina. For certain products with no previous registration history in Argentina, a sworn declaration can provide a temporary registration for up to two years while efficacy and residue data are generated. A later resolution extended recognition to registrations already approved by regulators in countries with more stringent evaluation standards, reducing, in principle, how much duplicate testing a company needs to run to sell the same product domestically.2

Panama has also tightened controls on highly hazardous pesticides. In January 2026, the Ministry of Agricultural Development prohibited the registration, import, manufacture, formulation, sale and agricultural use of eight highly hazardous pesticides, adding to a separate list of 12 substances prohibited in April 2025.

Taken together, these moves share a logic. None of the four countries has abandoned oversight; what they have reduced is duplication — of paperwork, of testing already done elsewhere, of manual steps a digital system can handle faster. It is a form of loosening aimed less at lowering the bar for what gets approved than at lowering the cost of proving a product clears it. For a company with a broad portfolio and limited regulatory staff, that distinction matters: it changes how many people and how much time a registration requires, even where the underlying scientific standard has not moved at all.

It also changes where companies choose to file first. A dossier that has already cleared a stringent regulator elsewhere in the world now carries more weight in Argentina than it did two years ago; a product that can be filed and tracked entirely online has a real advantage in Uruguay simply by virtue of not sitting in a paper queue. None of this guarantees approval, but it does mean the fastest path to market is no longer necessarily the market with the largest crop area or the biggest existing customer base — it can just as easily be the one that has done the most to remove friction from its own process.

Regulatory Pressure

Set against this is a second, less forgiving trend, and Brazil is its clearest example. Brazil's National Program for the Reduction of Pesticide Use, established by Presidential Decree No. 12,538/2025, calls for the gradual and continuous reduction of pesticide use, with particular attention to products considered highly hazardous to the environment or extremely toxic to human health.3 At the same time, MAPA granted a record 912 registrations for pesticides and related products in 2025, including 162 products classified as bioinputs.4 The two trends are not really contradictory; they are two sides of the same shift. Brazil is registering more products, faster, while extending considerably less patience to anything that falls outside the rules — a distinction that rewards companies with clean, well-prepared dossiers and penalizes those relying on older or borderline chemistry.

Mexico's own tightening arrived almost simultaneously with its simplification. In September 2025, President Claudia Sheinbaum signed a decree banning 35 pesticide active ingredients considered highly hazardous — the country's first move of this scale since 1991.5 The government has indicated that the 2025 measure forms part of a broader, multi-year pesticide-reduction strategy. It is a reminder that "simplification" and "restriction" are not opposite policy directions so much as two tools a single government can use at once, aimed at different parts of the same portfolio.

Ecuador has taken a narrower but comparable step. In May 2026, its agricultural regulator prohibited the import of pesticides containing chlorpyrifos, in line with the country's commitments under the Stockholm Convention, and asked registration holders to report existing stock so authorities could calculate a national inventory ahead of a full phase-out. 

Costa Rica, meanwhile, illustrates a different kind of regulatory pressure: administrative strain within the registration system. In May 2026, the government granted agrochemical registrants an additional two years to submit technical information required to maintain registrations for active ingredients, a move that prevented the cancellation of 137 technical-grade active ingredient registrations underpinning 1,780 formulated products. The extension came as authorities continued to work through registration requirements and adjustments to the country's registration-by-reference system.

Not every instance of regulatory pressure, in other words, is a deliberate policy choice — some are the byproduct of limited institutional capacity meeting a growing caseload.

Regional Harmonization: Promise and Practice

The most instructive case may be the one part of Latin America that has actually tried to regulate pesticides as a bloc rather than country by country. Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Bolivia share a common legal framework for pesticide registration under the Andean Community, most recently updated through Decision 804 in 2015, along with a shared technical manual — Resolution 2075 — that standardized how products must be labeled under the Globally Harmonized System for classifying chemical hazards.6

On paper, this is regional harmonization working as intended: one set of rules, four countries, no need to design a separate compliance strategy for each market. In practice, the timeline attached to that single rule has already had to be renegotiated once. Resolution 2075 gave companies 60 months to update their labels, with a deadline of February, 2025. By the time that date arrived, thousands of pesticide applications across the bloc were still mid-process, and the Andean Community's General Secretariat extended the deadline by a further four years, to February 2029.7 A subsequent Andean Community decision also provided additional time for Bolivia and Peru to complete the re-evaluation of older pesticide registrations.8 The Community has also launched a shared digital platform listing banned pesticides across member states, an attempt to close some of the transparency gap the labeling delay exposed.

The lesson here is not that the Andean framework has failed. Most companies operating across the bloc still describe the underlying rules as broadly workable, and a shared legal text remains, in principle, more efficient than four unrelated ones. What the labeling delay shows is that a common rulebook does not, by itself, guarantee a common regulatory experience. Institutional capacity, local politics and the sheer administrative load of processing thousands of applications at once still shape how a rule plays out on the ground, even when several countries have formally signed onto the same one — and a company operating in more than one Andean market can still find itself managing four separate timelines in practice.

For companies deciding where to prioritize registration efforts, none of this reduces neatly to a single takeaway. A market that looks restrictive on paper, like Brazil, may still be the fastest place to get a well-prepared product approved. A market that looks open, like Mexico, is simultaneously narrowing what chemistry it will accept. And a market that appears to offer regional consistency, like the Andean bloc, may still require country-by-country patience once a policy meets the reality of implementation. What has changed over the past two to three years is less the direction of any single country's regulation than the range across the region as a whole — and the premium that range places on knowing, market by market, which of these dynamics is actually in play.