Good News for a Change by David Suzuki

Author:David Suzuki [Suzuki, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT011000
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2003-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Integrated Pest Management

All of this is being accomplished right now, using the conventional hybrid seeds presently available, and without the need for expensive inputs such as synthetic pesticides and fertilizers or GM seeds.

— INTERNATIONAL CENTRE OF INSECT PHYSIOLOGY AND ECOLOGY, NAIROBI

As we said, corn is the most important single crop in southern and eastern Africa, but losses from stemborers run from 15 to 40 percent, and from the striga weed, another 10 to 20 percent. “When these two pests occur together,” reports the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Kenya, “farmers can lose their entire crop. By preventing such losses, an additional six to eight million people in the region can have food.” For many years, farmers have known that planting certain crops together, termed “inter- or companion-cropping,” can increase fertility and discourage pests. This knowledge has been refined, and today, a methodology called Integrated Pest Management (IPM), first developed in the 1970s, is becoming more and more widespread.

IPM pioneered, or rather revived, an old method called “push-pull.” It means that food crops are planted together with two other types of plants, one that will repel the pests (the “push”), and another that will attract them (the “pull”). In this case, the Kenyan researcher planted molasses grass (Melinis minutifolia) and the leguminous silverleaf (Desmodium uncinatum) between the rows of corn. The grass also repels ticks, and the silverleaf fixes nitrogen. The combination suppresses the striga weed by a factor of 40 when compared to a corn monocrop, and is nutritious fodder for animals. Like the Indian polyculture systems, Kenyan farmers used to intercrop in the past. Reviving their methods with additional scientific input and understanding “helps restore the balance of nature that humankind has disturbed by … practices such as over-intensive monocultures, misuse of pesticides, and soil depletion,” says ICIPE.41

The project has also identified over thirty wild grasses that can serve as hosts for stemborers and might also be used to attract the pests away from the fields. This technique has been tested on over 450 farms in two districts of Kenya and has now been released for general use. “Participating farmers in [the area] are reporting a 15 to 20 percent increase in grain yield.” There are more double dividends: the improved fodder is increasing milk yields. When farmers use this multi-crop system, they get a return of $2.30 (U.S.) for every dollar invested, compared to a $1.40 when they simply grow corn alone.

The people using industrial farming and biotech are crisis managers, honing in on the “problem” of a particular disease or pest, but never getting a holistic vision of an entire ecosystem that has other valuable components to cherish and encourage. The industrial perspective sees pests as enemies that must be defeated in an all-out war. In its view of an ideal future, the ecosystem will produce the crops, plant and animal, that humans have decided to insert into it — and nothing more. IPM is not an organic technology, and will employ pesticides as

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