IPM Policy: The Need To Create An Enabling Environment For Ipm Implementation

Hermann Waibel, Department of Economics and Business Administration, University of Hannover, Germany
E-mail: waibel@ifgb.uni-hannover.de

Abstract

The situation with pest problems on the global level and past experience with their control strongly suggests that unilateral control strategies such as chemical pesticides or single biotechnology approaches are unlikely to provide sustainable solutions. Instead, global developments, as evidenced in the literature as well as through casual observations in farmers fields around the world, underlines the need to develop and implement location-specific IPM solutions. Unfortunately, adoption of IPM on a global scale has not met its expectations. For example, despite evidence that insecticides in Asian rice production are overused from an economic, ecological and human health point of view, it remains a puzzle why apparently farmers’ don’t change their pest control practices. Although success was demonstrated in selected areas, e.g. in Indonesia and Vietnam, the overall evidence of a change in farmers’ practice is not clear. A recent study from Indonesia even found that farmers who had received intensive IPM training in Farmer Field Schools are now spending more on pesticides than before the training in spite of a declining trend in yields and lower rice prices. In addition to a review of examples of IPM implementation from around the world, the paper also assesses the institutional environment for IPM on the global level. It is found that the growing complexity of pest management systems raises a number of policy research questions. Firstly, the trend towards market liberalisation in the absence of specific policy frameworks has often been negative for IPM. For the pesticide market, liberalisation without effective regulations and adequate market-based incentives may lower the costs of supplying pesticides, but at the same time can increase the tendency for ineffective, inefficient and non-sustainable crop protection. Hence, the question of how an effective and efficient policy framework suitable to facilitate the sustainable management of pests could be designed poses a challenge for international agricultural research related to IPM. Secondly, the question of cost-effective extension approaches to bring IPM to millions of farmers has been subject to controversial debates among major development organisations. These discussions were not always carried out on scientific grounds and sometimes were used as a vehicle of a controversy among different stakeholder for their different views on development. This has increased the danger that in the case of IPM the situation can be exploited by companies who sell crop protection products and who use IPM as a marketing instrument to maximise sales of chemical pesticides biotechnology products. The paper outlines an agenda that can help to more effectively link the science of IPM with an agro-environmental policy framework. A number of measures are proposed that can be further specified in the context of interdisciplinary research.