VISION
News & Views
November 1998
The Future of Pest Management and Food Production
The supply of food—especially grains—in developing countries will have to rise by around 70 percent by 2020 if the 6.5 billion people who are expected to be living there are going to be food secure. Improved pest management is likely to be an important part of the effort to increase available supplies of food in developing countries. In Pest Management and Food Production: Looking to the Future, 2020 Discussion Paper 25, Montague Yudelman, Annu Ratta, and David Nygaard discuss the best means for reducing food loss due to pests.One obstacle to formulating a strategy for improving pest management, the authors explain, is the inadequate knowledge about actual losses from pests and the real and potential gains from different types of pest management. It is imperative to improve the methods for estimating all the costs and benefits of reducing losses.
The paper stresses that the demand for chemical pesticides is expected to grow apace as developing countries intensify crop production to meet national needs. Corporations are developing new, less toxic, less persistent, narrow-spectrum products, partly owing to pressure from environmental groups in developed countries. But developing countries lack strong environmental movements, and their regulation of the manufacturing and distribution of the older, more toxic pesticides, which are cheaper than the new ones, is extremely lax. As a result the demand for these harmful products is growing.
Promoting integrated pest management (IPM) would be one way of reducing chemical pesticide use, according to the authors, but there is still no universally accepted definition of IPM. It is probable that the forms of IPM that will be encouraged will rely on biological approaches with the judicious use of some chemical pesticides.
The next 20 years will also see a substantial increase in the use of genetically engineered plants, but the overall effect on pesticide use remains to be seen, the authors say. The new technologies have been developed in North America and Europe by the private sector. Developing countries will have a limited number of options if they wish to take advantage of the fruits of biotechnological research. One option is for the larger, more advanced countries to invest in domestic biotechnology research suited to national circumstances. Another option would be to “leapfrog” the technological gap by arranging to share new technologies with the corporations that own the rights to these technologies.
To discuss these complex issues further, IFPRI held a panel discussion on September 24 to coincide with the publication of this paper. (See Letter .) Montague Yudelman, Klaus Leisinger of the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development, and David Pimentel of Cornell University led the discussion.
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