Stephen Sherwood

Obstacles to integrated pest management adoption in developing countries

Significance Integrated pest management (IPM) has been the dominant crop protection paradigm promoted globally since the 1960s. However, its adoption by developing country farmers is surprisingly low. This article reports 51 potential reasons why, identified and prioritized by hundreds of IPM professionals and practitioners around the world. Stakeholders from developing countries prioritized different adoption obstacles than those from high-income countries. Surprisingly, a few of the obstacles prioritized in developing countries appear to be overlooked by the literature. We suggest that a more vigorous analysis and discussion of the factors discouraging IPM adoption in developing countries may accelerate the progress needed to bring about its full potential. Despite its theoretical prominence and sound principles, integrated pest management (IPM) continues to suffer from anemic adoption rates in developing countries. To shed light on the reasons, we surveyed the opinions of a large and diverse pool of IPM professionals and practitioners from 96 countries by using structured concept mapping. The first phase of this method elicited 413 open-ended responses on perceived obstacles to IPM. Analysis of responses revealed 51 unique statements on obstacles, the most frequent of which was “insufficient training and technical support to farmers.” Cluster analyses, based on participant opinions, grouped these unique statements into six themes: research weaknesses, outreach weaknesses, IPM weaknesses, farmer weaknesses, pesticide industry interference, and weak adoption incentives. Subsequently, 163 participants rated the obstacles expressed in the 51 unique statements according to importance and remediation difficulty. Respondents from developing countries and high-income countries rated the obstacles differently. As a group, developing-country respondents rated “IPM requires collective action within a farming community” as their top obstacle to IPM adoption. Respondents from high-income countries prioritized instead the “shortage of well-qualified IPM experts and extensionists.” Differential prioritization was also evident among developing-country regions, and when obstacle statements were grouped into themes. Results highlighted the need to improve the participation of stakeholders from developing countries in the IPM adoption debate, and also to situate the debate within specific regional contexts.

Making Sense of Agrobiodiversity, Diet, and Intensification of Smallholder Family Farming in the Highland Andes of Ecuador

Methods are needed for helping researchers and farmers to interactively describe and analyze local practices in search of opportunities for improving health, environment, and economy. The authors worked with smallholder family farmers in five Andean villages in Ecuador to apply participatory four-cell analysis (PFCA) in characterizing agrobiodiversity. Margelef and Shannon indices examined ecological richness and evenness, and a simplified 24-hour dietary recall characterized food consumption. Cross-analysis tested interactions among agrobiodiversity, farm size, and diet. Overall trends appeared to work against sustainable intensification, with notable heterogeneity and positive deviance found in the practices of relatively smaller enterprises, representing a potential resource for sustainable intensification. The suite of methods was determined useful for initiating researcher-farmer explorations of promising innovation pathways.

Assessment and characterization of the diet of an isolated population in the Bolivian Andes.

Objectives: The goal of this research is to characterize the composition and nutrient adequacy of the diets in the northern region of the Department of Potosí, Bolivia. Communities in this semiarid, mountainous region are isolated and impoverished having the highest rates of child malnutrition and under‐five mortality in the Americas.

The Future of Sustainability as a Product of the Present: Lessons from Modern Food in Ecuador

Drawing on historical research in the northern highlands of Ecuador, the authors summarize how 75 years of state-supported agricultural modernization and subsequent food policies have led to diverse, wide-scale socio-environmental decline. Despite this global trend, they find considerable heterogeneity in familylevel farming and food practices, with highly diverse and important implications for human health, economy and the environment. Following a study of ‘positive deviance’, they argue that certain production-consumption patterns are more sustainable than others, representing a time-proven, yet largely neglected resource for policy reform. Nevertheless, Ecuador’s investment in modern food poses formidable institutional challenges to change, while sparking increasingly influential social counter-movements.