Integrated pest management and the (un)sustainable use of pesticides

Doutoramento em Engenharia Agronómica - Instituto Superior de Agronomia - UL

Consumer awareness of health and environmental safety has led to the design and application of policy tools for the dissemination of sustainable agricultural practices, such as integrated pest management, and of rules for the proper use of pesticides. In the last two decades, the adoption of integrated pest management has increased in Europe and, since 2014, farmers should use it as a basis for their crop protection strategy, according to the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive. Within this framework, this thesis involves an assessment of the technical and environmental benefits that are a result of integrated pest management adoption, an analysis of the demand for food products obtained in this farming system, which is differentiated though the presence of attributes related to health safety and environmental quality, and a discussion of the policy tools that might be used to promote the reduction or nonuse of pesticides. Integrated pest management evolution in Portugal is described based on country statistics. At the same time, farming practices and farmers’ attitudes, perceptions and motivations, as well as pesticide monitoring and biodiversity assessment, were collected in vineyards and apple and pear orchards. A set of sustainable farming practices and attitudes associated with integrated pest management adoption was identified as possible environmental indicators that can be useful to measure the associated benefits. Pesticide use, biodiversity, farmers’ attitudes and perceptions (or motivations) and technical itineraries were included in a global indicator - the Pesticide print – that can be used to assess the environmental impact caused by the crop protection strategy and pesticide use. Integrated pest management farms presented a lower impact on the environment, when compared with conventional farms (about 5% less). The Pesticide print proved to be a good global indicator that can be used to assess the impact of different farming systems, per country, region, farmers’ association, over time, as well as to define a framework of technical commitments that should be adopted to obtain effective benefits from the sustainable use of pesticides. We have also tried to understand the Portuguese consumers’ attitudes and knowledge about the sustainable use of pesticide and its effects on the purchasing frequency of certified food products produced in environmentally friendly and healthy farming systems, such as integrated pest management. Our sample of Portuguese consumers can be clustered in three groups - ‘habitual buyers’, ‘occasional buyers’ and ‘non-buyers’ - based on their experience in buying certified food and knowledge about the use of pesticides in agriculture and its risks for human health and the environment. The lack of consumer knowledge and awareness concerning pesticide use stands as a key issue for policy design and marketing strategies. Finally, we developed an innovative method that uses data from stated preference methods (discrete-choice contingent valuation data) in a much more straightforward way to estimate the probability of purchasing differentiated products as a function of the price premium level, household income, level of consumption of the food item, and knowledge about environmentally friendly and healthy farming systems. This approach allowed us to define a demand curve for food from farming systems that use less, or don’t use, pesticides (sustainable use of pesticides), when conventional food is also available, and to compare the option for “market differentiation” with alternative policy tools to promote the sustainable use of pesticides.