Ecological illiteracy can deepen farmers' pesticide dependency

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Abstract

Nearly 2.5 billion smallholders cultivate the world's arable land, strategically positioned to tackle multiple Anthropocene challenges. When consciously adopting ecologically-based pest management practices, they can improve resource use efficiency, slow biodiversity loss, curtail environmental pollution and safeguard human health. Yet, the effective implementation of knowledge-intensive management practices requires underlying ecological concepts to be well-understood. Here, drawing upon published social science research spanning 1910-2016, we illuminate deficiencies in the world's farmers' ecological literacy and in their valuation of insect-mediated ecosystem services. Though tribal people and indigenous folk possess sophisticated knowledge of insects that occur within farm settings, contemporary farmers on average know a mere 1.9-2.3 pestiferous herbivores and 0.5-0.9 pest-killing organisms (out of a respective 8 and 3 taxa) in a particular crop or cropping system. Ecosystem services such as biological pest control are annually worth hundreds of dollars ha-1 but remain unknown to nearly 70% of farmers globally. Also, agricultural systems with deficient ecological literacy tend to foster a greater dependency upon chemically-synthesized pesticides. If this 'cognitive handicap' can be remediated, farmers could become agro-biodiversity stewards and champions in redressing multiple aspects of global environmental change.

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Wyckhuys, K. A. G., Heong, K. L., Sanchez-Bayo, F., Bianchi, F. J. J. A., Lundgren, J. G., & Bentley, J. W. (2019, September 6). Ecological illiteracy can deepen farmers’ pesticide dependency. Environmental Research Letters. Institute of Physics Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab34c9

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