Integrated Pest Management - the key to a future of prosperity

India’s agriculture sector is already grappling with the fallout of climate change. But, if increasingly frequent extreme events, erratic rainfall and unseasonal weather were not enough for farmers to contend with, warming temperatures have left farmlands exposed to another threat — pest attacks.

From chilies and cotton to wheat, sugarcane and rice, ever more frequent pest attacks are ravaging India’s crops, taking a toll on farmer incomes, farmland productivity and threatening our food security.

As much as 25 percent of the country’s produce is lost to pest attacks every year costing the agriculture sector nearly $20 billion. ¹

As temperatures continue to climb, pest attacks are only set to grow more frequent and severe as even a one degree increase in temperature can drive pests’ metabolic rates by as much as 20 percent. ²

What’s more — farmlands in temperature zones previously unfavourable to pests to attacks will also now be exposed to the threat because of the warming climate.

So, clearly, pests are a problem that are here to stay. Farmlands will therefore need to adapt. They will need to engineer resilience. The practice of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) could hold the key to safeguarding our country’s farmland productivity and by extension our food security.

Integrated Pest Management and its impact

Integrated Pest Management is a carefully calibrated combination of compatible methods — cultural, biological, chemical and physical — working together to protect crops from pests.

It is a more sustainable and environmentally responsible approach to pest management with chemical pesticides only supplementing other more natural methods as a last resort as opposed to the convention practice of dousing the crop with pesticide.

Cultural methods typically involve crop rotation, with farmers cycling through a variety of crops, which avoids attracting pests that are drawn to a single crop, like Pink Bollworm is to cotton or thrips are to chilies. 

With physical methods pests are eradicated either by hand-picking them or now through mechanical methods, while in the biological method, farmers encourage the presence of natural predators that feed on pests. The chemical approach is the last resort use of pesticides. 

In short, Integrated Pest Management is a sustainable, ecosystem-centric approach tailored to specific crops. Its effectiveness has been proven.

Adopting IPM has significantly boosted yields of several crops. For instance, rice yields have gone up as much as 40 percent, while cotton yields have risen 26 percent thanks to the IPM approach, according to government data. ³

At the same time, the use of IPM has also enhanced the quality of the yields. If applied more widely, using the IPM approach has the potential to drive a transformation in the agriculture sector, boosting productivity, farm prosperity and safeguarding food security at a time when it is becoming increasingly harder to grow food.

Barriers to adoption

Therein lies the challenge — the practice of IPM has been around for decades. But it is still used only on a very small percentage of India’s farmland, roughly about 3-5 percent of the country’s total area under cultivation.

Chief among the reasons why that is so is the significant upfront investment required. IPM in the long run is a lower cost approach. As highlighted above it also has the potential to boost incomes. Yet, the high upfront cost of adoption acts as a deterrent especially for small and marginal farmers who make up the majority of India’s agricultural landscape.

To overcome this, a concerted effort is needed from all stakeholders, from policymakers and researches to extension workers and farmers, to propagate the adoption of IPM.

At the same time, targeted interventions like subsidies and strengthening of extension services, can not only reduce the burden of the initial investment on farmers but can also incentivise them to adopt IPM. This in turn can help accelerate the transition towards sustainable pest management practices.

That’s because IPM represents so much more than just another pest management approach. IPM is an example of sustainable agriculture at its best — boosting food production while conserving ecosystems, resources, biodiversity, soil health and of course human health. 

But more than that IPM is the key to a bright future for Indian agriculture, a new golden age of prosperity and plenty.

¹ Integrated Pest Management in India

² The Indian Agricultural Landscape and Its Impact on Agrochemical Consumption: A Look Toward 2030

³ Battling Climate Change - Enhancing Crop Protection is the Need of the Hour