Agriculture and Environment: Rice

Better Management Practices: Reduce Pesticide Use

The effect of pesticides on estuaries, rivers, and fragile coastal zones are all reflected in the reduction of fish catch and aquatic biodiversity, as well as species that depend on aquatic biodiversity for food.

Reductions in pesticide use will reduce the damage fro agriculture on all downstream biodiversity.

Data from Thailand and the Philippines suggests that integrated pest management (IPM) can reduce the use of insecticides on rice by 75-95%. Furthermore, there is no need to use the most toxic categories of pesticides to achieve the same or better results (Witte et al. 1993).

The first recorded implementation of IPM for rice on a massive scale was in Indonesia, where 50,000 farmers were trained in IPM techniques in 1990. Training of farmers was accompanied by the banning of 57 trade formulations of rice insecticides and the introduction of pest-resistant rice varieties.

The acreage previously affected by pests such as the brown plant hopper decreased fro over 200,000 hectares to below 25,000. In addition, pesticide production in Indonesia dropped from 55,000 metric tons per year to 25,000 metric tons, while rice production increased from 28 million metric tons to 30 million metric tons (Kenmore 199). It is not clear how much the program cost or whether it was cost-effective.

In the Philippines, by contrast, the costs of IPM training are well documented. IPM program costs are estimated at 230 million pesos (the Philippine currency) per year over 5 years. Costs per trained farmer are expected to be 500 pesos for the training component only, or 1,150 pesos including management, monitoring, evaluation, and administration.

This compares to reduced pesticide costs of approximately 448 pesos per hectare per crop. If 2 crops of rice are grown annually, this results in a cost recovery in less than 1 year for the average rice farmer with 1.6 hectares.

Another way to look at the expense of the program is that it represents 0.18% of the proposed budget for the country's Rice Development Plan. Fertilizer assistance, by comparison, required 12% of the same budget (Witte et al. 1993).

In Vietnam, an IPM program reduced insecticide use in the Mekong Delta by an estimated 72%. What's more, the number of farmers who believed that insecticides would bring higher yields fell from 83% before the IPM campaign to just 13% after (Rice Today 2002).

In China, researchers found that interplanting disease-resistant hybrid rice reduced the severity of the disease known as rice blast by 94% and improved the yield of the highly values glutinous variety by 89% (Zhu et al., as cited in Rice Today