Motivations behind farmers’ pesticide use in Bangladesh rice farming

This paper addresses the motivations behind farmers’ pesticide use in two regions of Bangladesh. The paper considers farmers’ knowledge of arthropods and their perceptions about pests and pest damage, and identifies why many farmers do not use recommended pest management practices. We propose that using the novel approach of classifying farmers according to their motivations and constraints rather than observed pesticide use can improve training approaches and increase farmers’ uptake and retention of more appropriate integrated pest management technologies. Elizabeth J. Z. Robinson divides her time between Tanzania and the UK and is a research associate with the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford in the UK. She is an economist specializing in agriculture, natural resources, and the environment. She has over ten years of experience undertaking applied research in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa as a fellow and lecturer in the Economics Department at the University of Oxford; at the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich in the UK; and with the World Bank and Rockefeller Foundation in the US. Sumona Rani Das is an agriculture economist who has been working for eight years with a non-government organization in Bangladesh named PROSHIKA. She is involved with monitoring and evaluation of PROSHIKA’s ongoing activities in agriculture, and is working as a team leader with an agriculture network to promote sustainable agriculture. She has special responsibility for motivation, training, project management, and documentation of different programs. Tim B. C. Chancellor is a crop protection specialist and currently is the leader of the Natural Resources Institute’s Plant, Animal and Human Health Group at the University of Greenwich in the UK. He has 17 years research and consultancy experience in vector ecology and in pest and disease management. Other skills include project management, monitoring and evaluation, and public-private partnerships. He is also Adviser to the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID) Crop Protection Programme. His commodity experience includes rice, banana, groundnut and vegetables.