Crop Protection Monographs – serie

Advisory work, by its very nature, is an intermediary between the re­ search worker and those who apply the results of his research. The challenge of advisory work is to devise means of and find pathways for transmitting research results to the user, overcome the reluctance of the latter to change, and often combine novel ideas with well-estab­ lished traditions. Nowhere is this challenge greater than in farming. This is especially true in developing countries, where the gap in the educational level between research workers and farmers may be ex­ tremely wide. Moreover, village-level advisers are often overburdened with non-professional functions and are not sufficiently backed up by well-trained professional advisers. Thus, in many of these countries there is a serious discrepancy between the knowledge available and that needed and actually applied on the farm. Advisory work in crop protection is no exception, but profits to some extent from two facts: (1) because of the potentially catastrophic nature of pest attack, governments often operate a supervisory crop protection service, the staff of which may be able to dispense some pest control advice; and (2) the staff of pesticide distributors tends to fill, at least in part, the need for advice on how to fight pests and dis­ eases with chemicals.

As a result of the green revolution, the use of yield-increasing inputs such as fer­ tilizer and pesticides became a matter of course in irrigated rice farming in Southeast Asia. Pesticides were applied liberally, both as a guarantee against crop failure and as a means of fully utilizing the existing yield potential of the crops. However, since outbreaks of pests, such as the brown planthopper (BPH) or the tungro virus, continued to occur despite the application of chemicals, a change of approach began to take place. It is now being realized more and more in Southeast Asia that crop protection problems cannot be resolved solely by the application of chemicals. In the past several years, increasing efforts have there­ fore been made to introduce, as a first step, supervised crop protection, leading gradually to integrated pest management (Kranz, 1982). Although the crop protection problems naturally differ in the different devel­ oping countries in Southeast Asia, the economic situation prevailing in these countries can nevertheless be regarded as an important common determinant: pesticide imports use up scarce foreign currency and thus compete with other imports essential to development. For the individual rice farmer, the problem is basically the same: his cash funds are limited and he must carefully weigh whether to use them for purchas­ ing pesticides, fertilizer or certified seed. In view of this constraint, it is becom­ ing necessary to abandon the purely prophylactic, routine calendar spraying and instead, employ critically timed and need-based pesticide applications.