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Pesticide Productivity and Farmers' Efficiency in Alternative Pest Management Practices in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam
Dissertation Abstract:
This study aimed to develop a bio-economic model to measure the productivity of pesticides. It also attempted to estimate and compare the efficiency level of the current farmers’ practices and of IPM strategy of pest management, and to identify factors affecting technical and allocative efficiencies of the farmers, as well as pesticides overuse.
The study was conducted in the province of Tiengiang in the Mekong Delta, with six villages from the main rice producing districts. In each village, six IPM farmers and six non-IPM farmers were randomly selected for the data collection.
For measuring the productivity of pesticides, a model which included five equations: an insect infestation function, a disease infection function, an insect kill function, a disease control function, and a bio-economic production function, was developed. These functions were estimated using OLS estimation method. Marginal productivity of pesticide was calculated separately for the preventive and curative approaches of pesticide application. A frontier production function was also estimated using MLE estimation method. Technical and allocative efficiency were calculated for each farm.
In the production frontier analysis, the results indicated that there exists a significant level of technical inefficiency in rice production in the study area. On the average, IPM farmers achieved higher technical and allocative efficiency than non- IPM farmers. It was also found that both technical and allocative efficiency of the farmers can be improved through increasing farmers’ knowledge by IPM training and better credit access by farmers.
Results showed that there were possibilities of using cultural methods for effective pest management. These methods included: growing resistant varieties, optimal use of N, P, K fertilizers, and seed rate to substitute for the use of pesticides by farmers.
Marginal productivity of curative pesticide use was found to be much higher than that of preventive pesticide use. The preventive use of pesticides by farmers was found to be economically not efficient since the return from using it was less than its cost. Even for the curative use of pesticides, the results also showed that farmers misused pesticides in most cases. The analysis showed that farmers’ pest management decisions were far from optimal, indicating that there is a potential for farmers in the study area to improve the efficiency of pesticide use.
Results from the logistics analysis showed that IPM training and improving farmers’ knowledge will significantly reduce pesticide misuse by the farmers, while the errors in farmer’s expectation on yield loss due to pest attack will significantly increase the probability of pesticide misuse by the farmers. Pesticide misuse is also expected to decline with the increase of time spent for field visit and pest monitoring Since there were large errors in the farmers’ expectation on yield losses due to pest, improving farmers’ estimation yield on yield losses due to pests will significantly decrease pesticide misuse by the farmers.
