Rice Production Worldwide by Bhagirath S. Chauhan Khawar Jabran & Gulshan Mahajan

Author:Bhagirath S. Chauhan, Khawar Jabran & Gulshan Mahajan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

12.3 Addressing Common Beliefs About Insects in Rice Fields

12.3.1 Assessing the Belief that Most Insects Are “Bad”

It is a common concern among researchers working in “pest” management that farmers fail to differentiate “good insects” from “bad insects” and generally have little understanding of the effectiveness of the “good insects” in managing the “bad” (International Rice research Institute 1993; Lazaro and Heong 1995). Often, farmers that note one or two insects (individuals) attacking a rice plant will exaggerate the potential risk when extrapolating to field scales. A single caterpillar feeding on a plant or a small amount of apparent damage is often enough to precipitate a round of insecticide spraying (Rubia et al. 1996b; Bandong et al. 2002; Escalada and Heong 2004). Lazaro et al. (1993) found that farmers grossly overestimate yield losses from stemborers (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) and often attributed yield losses from other factors (lack of fertilizer, late planting, etc.) to insect damage. Farmers who have poorly managed their fields, resulting in high densities of some apparent pest (such as planthoppers [Homoptera: Delphacidae]), will often cause their neighbors to unnecessarily spray their own fields in the mistaken belief that pest insects will move from a sprayed field to any adjacent unsprayed field (Litsinger et al. 1987; Rubia et al. 1996b). Unfortunately, pesticide vendors will often capitalize on the farmer’s inability to accurately or objectively assess risks from insect herbivores to his/her rice crop by prescribing pesticide applications (Escalada et al. 2009; Thorburn 2015). Farmers’ field schools and targeted education campaigns have gone a long way in improving the situation among farmers. For example, Indonesia’s National Integrated Pest Management Program and the Farmer Field Schools of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) were apparently successful in reducing insecticide use in the 1990s (Matteson 2000; Thorburn 2015). These schools aimed to train farmers to recognize the beneficial roles of predatory insects; however, such education campaigns have variable impacts in reducing pesticide applications (Lazaro and Heong 1995), suffer from a lack of continuity (due to poor funding), and suffer from aggressive product advertising by agrochemical companies (Escalada et al. 2009; Thorburn 2015), who sometimes become a part of pest management training (Ferroni and Zhou 2012).

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