Protecting Seeds, Fertiliser and Crop Chemicals in Africa
A farmer who buys a counterfeit pesticide does not find out at the till. They find out at harvest, when the season is gone and there is no second chance until next year. Agricultural inputs are the category where verification has to work for a first-time smartphone user, standing in an agro-dealer's shop, on a weak connection.
Why agro-inputs are hit hardest
Kenya's Anti-Counterfeit Authority found in its 2025 consumer-level survey that pesticides, insecticides and herbicides accounted for about 89% of the counterfeit cases consumers reported, with fertiliser and soil conditioners at roughly 54% and seed at about 46%. Industry estimates circulated by CropLife and in Gates Open Research put the share of fake product far higher still — commonly quoted as 30–50% of seed and more than 60% of pesticides in some markets. Those wider figures are estimates rather than measurements, and should be quoted as such, but every source points the same way.
Enforcement gives a sense of the volumes involved. In early 2025 Kenyan authorities seized around 190,000 bags of counterfeit fertiliser in Nairobi that were reportedly destined for illegal repackaging, and intercepted 233 bags valued at about KES 23 million in Molo, Nakuru County.
The two problems a code has to solve
Copied packaging
Crop protection packaging is comparatively simple to imitate, and a farmer has no way to tell a good copy from the real thing by eye. A signed code cannot be invented: a made-up code fails validation, and a photocopied one gives itself away when the same serial is scanned repeatedly, across many devices and places.
Refilled genuine containers
The harder problem is a real container, with a real label, refilled with diluted or inert product. This is where placement matters more than technology: the code needs to sit under a seal or cap liner, so that scanning it requires breaking the seal and a refilled container cannot present an unused code. We work through that placement with your packaging team during onboarding — and we will tell you when a placement gives weak protection rather than selling you codes that look reassuring and prove little.
Built for how agro-inputs actually reach farmers
- Agro-dealers can be issued their own verification codes, so their bulk stock checks are recognised as trade scans instead of tripping clone alarms.
- Each batch can be tied to the country it was shipped to, so subsidised or regionally priced stock that resurfaces in another market is flagged as diversion.
- Farmers verify in the phone browser with no app install, and the page is built to load on 3G.
- Consumer reports capture the county and the outlet where the product was bought, which is what turns scattered complaints into a map of where fakes are being sold.
- Counterfeit activity is grouped by region into a printable report you can take to a regulator or an industry working group.
Where the field team fits
Scan data tells you where to look. Someone still has to go and buy the product. Our field team, working from Kenya, runs market checks and test purchases in the areas your scan map highlights, documents what is on the shelf, and packages that into evidence you can hand to counsel, to the Anti-Counterfeit Authority, or to an industry anti-illicit-trade group such as the one CropLife Africa Middle East coordinates.
Agricultural Inputs: common questions
What brands in this category ask us before they start.
Our agro-dealers scan dozens of bags at a time. Will that look like fraud?
Not if they are signed in. Each dealer can be issued a verification code that marks their scans as verified trade activity, which is excluded from clone tallies. Their checks also do not consume the farmer's first scan, so the farmer still gets a clean first-scan result when they buy.
Does verification work without a data connection?
No, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Verification is a live check against our register, so the phone needs a data connection at the moment of scanning. In practice agro-dealer shops and market centres almost always have coverage, and the page is deliberately small so it loads on a weak 3G signal.
Can we stop counterfeiters refilling our containers?
You can make it visible. Put the code under a seal or cap liner so it can only be read by breaking the seal, and a refilled container has no unused code to show. Combined with clone detection, repeated scans of one serial across different places reveal where refilling is happening.
Still have a question? Talk to our team — we usually reply within one business day.
Protect your agricultural inputs
Start with 250 free codes, or talk to us about a market check in the country where you are losing sales.