Are There Productivity Gains from Insecticide Applications in Rice Production

Insecticides have always been viewed to be necessary inputs to achieve high rice production. However, this notion has been challenged by ecologists and economists and they have shown that Asian farmers’ insecticide use has poor or no productivity gains. Farm surveys of more than 5,000 households in the Mekong, Vietnam, and paired farmer experiments showed that farm yields were not correlated with the number of insecticide sprays used in most cases. In the paired experiments plots, there was no significant correlation between yield and number of sprays in both plots. A survey of farms in a rice planthopper outbreak area showed that farms that had applied insecticides in the early crop stages for leaf folder control had higher probability of heavy planthopper attacks or “hopper burn.” The reasons why rice farmers had continued to apply insecticides despite of the poor productivity gain might be due to their misperceptions that lead to overestimate losses caused by insects, the aggressive marketing of pesticides that heightens their loss aversion attitudes thus making them victims of insecticide abuse. Rice farmers appear to be “locked into” circumstances that continue to promote insecticide use despite the lack of productivity gains. With health costs from both acute and chronic long-term impacts and environmental costs especially in causing bee and bird mortalities, scientists and policy makers need to rethink future pesticide management strategies to avoid pesticides becoming a threat to food security instead.