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History of the Kastom Gaden Association...

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Sun, Oct 14, 2007

Kastom Garden Association
PROJECTS

INTEGRATED PEST MANAGEMENT MANUAL

Farmers involved in the project on North Malaita, Solomon Islands, have identified serious pest problems affecting their shifting cultivation fields. The fields are used for family food production and local marketing.

Farmers abandon crops, resort to pesticides

Some farmers have abandoned nutritionally important crops at certain times of the year and an increasing number have been resorting to the use of synthetic pesticides, especially for market crops. There have been numerous reports of the misuse of these pesticides and many farmers are poorly informed about how to use them.

Incidents reported during the project included:

farmers poisoning themselves, with some ending up in hospital

the poisoning of a village water supply when a pesticide container was washed out in the water catchment

numerous stories of local people feeling the effects of poisoning after consuming produce grown with excessive pesticide use, including the indiscriminate use of DDT left over from old malaria control programmes.

We were fearful that farmers were about to embark on a spiral of increasing pesticide use with the resultant destruction of natural insect pest-enemies, ecosystem balance and increasing negative health and environmental effects, such as have been experienced in other parts of the world.

A participatory approach to pest management

Between 1999 and 2000, APACE decided to try a participatory approach to solving some of these problems:

field workers based at Mana'abu Training Centre in North Malaita, Solomon Islands, worked with local farmers to identify individuals who had been successful at managing pest problems in their gardens

these farmers were invited to a series of workshops where they were given the opportunity to share their experience with other farmers; the group was introduced to the general principles and practices of integrated pest management (IPM)

a series of farmer field trials was then established where other farmers were invited to test the experiences of the innovative farmers

field visits to the innovative farmers' gardens were arranged to observe what they were doing in the field.

Farmers adopt successful methods

In general, it was found that the successful farmers had already developed and adopted their own methods of IPM. Usually, these combined traditional knowledge with their own careful observation and experience.

Adopted methods involved:

good garden hygiene

careful observation of insect life cycles

careful understanding of seasons

soils and soil fertility
the use of some botanical insecticides and repellents as a last resort.

The field trials were visited by our project field workers and the results discussed with farmers. Generally, the feeling was positive that farmers could make a significant improvement to manageing pest problems that would not damage the environment or their health by using improved information and local resources.

PTD proves successful

The process of sharing these farmers experiences was modelled on the process of Participatory Technology Development (PTD). The IPM project represents only the start of what must be an ongoing process to improve farmer's pest management practices in the face of rapid agricultural change.

Today, fallow periods are declining, new pests have been introduced and new crops often displace old in a period of agricultural intensification being experienced throughout most of the Pacific.

The manual, Integrated Pest Management, demonstrates the reliability of the basic principles of IPM and demonstrates the rich knowledge that farmers in any location have. This is knowledge that should be used as a building block to solve local pest problems.

>> next project: Chicken keeping

Publication

This is an excerpt from Roselyn's manual, Integrated Pest Management.

Integrated pest management is an approach made up of a range of techniques for the control of insect pests that damage crops.

Practiced widely and used by development professionals, the techniques can include both organic methods and the use of synthetic chemicals.

The Kastom Gaden Association takes the organic farming approach to:

avoid environmental pollution from the overuse of synthetic chemicals

avoid farmers' damaging their health through failure to take precautions in applying chemicals

reduce the cost of farming to cash poor villagers.

The manual
The manual Integrated Pest Management is available from the Kastom Gden Association
PO Box 972
Honiara Solomon Islands.

Or you can download a pdf version of the manual.

© 2007 Kastom Gaden Association | PO Box 742 Honiara SOLOMON ISLANDS | P:  677 39138 | F: 677 30840 |
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