Today, modern fluorine‐containing agrochemicals are of the utmost importance to control weeds, insect pests, and many plant diseases and, ultimately, to ensure sustainable yields, thereby securing the food supply for a growing world population. Over the past two decades, new fluorine‐containing pesticides have gained a significant market share, reflecting the enormous global economic success of modern crop protection. But despite the commercialization of many highly potent pesticides, new regulatory requirements and the need for new modes of action and resistance‐breaking products are still driving efforts to identify and introduce new compounds with even better efficacy and safety profiles.
This chapter describes the structures, chemotypes, modes of action, and syntheses of some of the newest organofluorine agrochemicals (fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides) recently commercialized or under development. The main objective of this review is to describe the evolutionary approaches of the latest generation of “small molecule” fluorinated pesticides as well as the associated synthetic challenges.
This chapter also describes new and “old” fluorine‐containing building blocks and focuses on their synthetic accessions for subsequent incorporation into large‐scale production of agrochemical active ingredients.
Since the majority of modern agrochemicals are protected by patents, the analysis of chemical processes in this review is primarily based on the original patent literature. Commercial production of crop protection compounds requires robust, environmentally friendly, safe, and ultimately economically viable processes. Numerous process patents impressively demonstrate how producers have met these criteria, solved synthesis problems, and ultimately developed pathways to economically viable agrochemical manufacturing. Finally, this review also aims to demonstrate the impact of fluorination on the environmental fate and possible metabolism pathways of certain fluorinated pesticides, with or without the release of polyfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids.