Political, social and perceptual aspects of integrated pest management programmes

Intergrated pest management (IPM) can be shown to be the best mix of available tactics for a given pest problem by comparison with the yield, profit and safety of alternative mixes. IPM programmes try to extend the best mix to large numbers of farmers, but can fail because of political, social or perceptual aspects of the programme-farmer relationship. From our review of 28 case studies of crop protection programmes from six continents and 11 crops we describe eight IPM programme pathologies that caused failures. We then present six IPM programme remedies designers of these programmes should use to enhance their chances of success. The most important is that IPM programme designers must begin to work with farmers