Our World
in Data
Data

Total pesticide use

FAO
See all data and research on:
Agricultural Production

What you should know about this indicator

Item: Pesticides (total) Description: Total pesticides, covering insecticides, fungicides and bactericides (including seed treatments), herbicides, plant growth regulators, rodenticides, mineral oils, disinfectants and others.

Metric: Agricultural Use Description: Amount used in the agricultural sector in the year

Source
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 14, 2024
Next expected update
March 2025
Date range
1990–2021
Unit
tonnes

Related research and writing

Thumnbail

How effective are policies in reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture?

Hannah Ritchie

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The Pesticides Use database includes data on the use of major pesticide groups (Insecticides, Herbicides, Fungicides, Plant growth regulators and Rodenticides) and of relevant chemical families.

Data report the quantities (in tonnes of active ingredients).

Retrieved on
March 14, 2024
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RP
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Pesticides Use (2024).

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Total pesticide use”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) - “Agricultural Production”. Data adapted from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/pesticide-use-tonnes [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Total pesticide use – FAO” [dataset]. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Pesticides Use” [original data]. Retrieved June 12, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/pesticide-use-tonnes