Area-Wide Integrated Pest Management (AW-IPM): Principles, Practice and Prospects

Integrated pest management (IPM) has remained the dominant paradigm of pest control for the last 50 years. IPM has been endorsed by essentially all the multilateral environmental agreements that have transformed the global policy framework of natural resource management, agriculture, and trade. The integration of a number of different control tactics into IPM systems can be done in ways that greatly facilitate the achievement of the goals either of field-by-field pest management, or of area-wide (AW) pest management, which is the management of the total pest population within a delimited area. For several decades IPM and AW pest control have been seen as competing paradigms with different objectives and approaches. Yet, the two “schools” have gradually converged, and it is now generally acknowledged that the synthesis, AW-IPM, neither targets only eradication, nor relies only on single control tactics, and that many successful AW programmes combine a centrally managed top-down approach with a strong grassroots bottom-up approach, and that some are managed in a fully bottom-up manner. AW-IPM is increasingly accepted especially for mobile pests where management at a larger scale is more effective and preferable to the uncoordinated field-by-field approach. For some livestock pests, vectors of human diseases, and pests of crops with a high economic value and low pest tolerance, there are compelling economic incentives for participating in AW control. Nevertheless issues of free riders, public participation and financing of public goods, all play a significant role in AW-IPM implementation. These social and managerial issues have, in several cases, severely hampered the positive outcome of AW programmes; and this emphasises the need for attention not only to ecological, environmental, and economic aspects, but also to the social and management dimensions. Because globalization of trade and tourism are accompanied by the increased movement of invasive alien pest species, AW programmes against major agricultural pests are often being conducted in urban and suburban areas. Especially in such circumstances, factors likely to shift attitudes from apathy to outrage, need to be identified in the programme planning stage and mitigated. This paper reviews the evolution and implementation of the AW-IPM concept and documents its process of development from basic research, through methods development, feasibility studies, commercialization and regulation, to pilot studies and operational programmes.

KEYWORDS area-wide IPM, field-by-field IPM, suppression, eradication, feasibility studies, pilot programmes, operational programmes, commercialization, regulation, public good, free rider, public participation