Congress Urged to Accelerate IPM Implementation
– New Partnerships Key to Success

Our ability to produce food and fiber in the United States in step with domestic and global demand depends upon access to safe, profitable and reliable pest management systems. Each year farmers and other pest managers spend more money and work harder in order to keep pace with Mother Nature, while also bringing safe and nutritious food to our tables and those of our overseas customers.

* New Tools Needed

Growers and other pest managers have fewer and fewer chemical control options to turn to because of increased regulations, development of resistance by pests to chemical controls, and the need to avoid triggering secondary pests. The "Food Quality Protection Act of 1996" is likely to further narrow the pesticide "tool-kit," especially for minor-use crops (high-value crops grown on relatively few acres).

* Pest Management is Key to Competitiveness

To remain competitive where our exporters now hold marketshare, and successfully hold or expand our share of health-conscious markets at home and abroad, growers will need a steady stream of new technologies and more complete, timely data on the interplay of pests, their natural enemies and crops. Both new tools and better information are essential for farmers to protect their crops and lower total production costs, while also reducing reliance on high-risk pesticides.

* Promising Alternatives on the Horizon

Confidence is growing in the profitability and effectiveness of biologically-based integrated pest management (IPM) systems, or biointensive IPM for short. Such systems combine the best pest control options available with an understanding of what is needed and will work to address pest problems on each farm.<p> Progress will depend on new partnerships drawing creatively on the skills of growers and consultants with in-depth field knowledge, local and regional pest management experts, and researchers and extension specialists. Limited funds should be leveraged whenever possible by requiring grower organizations, food processors and other partners to match federal funds, while also assuring the ability of small, grass-roots groups to fully participate in new partnerships.

Partnerships should focus on IPM implementation. A key step -- sharpening knowledge of pest biology, so that pest managers can seek out times during a pest's life-cycle when they are vulnerable and can be managed safely. We need to couple emerging insights with new tools so that farmers and other field-based IPM experts have several options to draw upon in weaving together more reliable systems.

Forming partnerships, creating tools and building human skills require effort and investment. Today, investment in biologically-based IPM is grossly inadequate. The gap is bound to widen without changes in priorities in both the public and private sectors.

Action Needed Now

The transition to IPM is well underway in many parts of the country, but many farmers still face tough technical and economic hurdles in moving incrementally from production systems largely dependent on pesticides toward biointensive IPM.

Progress is moving fastest in regions where experts and growers are working through partnerships to implement IPM. Expanded investment in IPM, focused on implementation, will both speed up and lower the long-run costs of the transition.

The USDA currently invests about $65 million in biologically-based pest management research and education. This investment represents just one slice of the Department's $64 billion annual budget if cut into a pie with 1,000 equal pieces.

By any measure this is a meager investment, given that pests reduce U.S. farm production by an estimated 30 percent each year and that over $15 billion is spent annually trying to control them. Public and private expenditures, and other indirect costs needed to manage and minimize pesticide risks add about a billion more to the cost of today's pest management systems.

The surest way to reduce the costs of protecting our crops and livestock, and to take advantage of consumer demand here and abroad for "environment friendly" products is to invest more in biologically-based IPM. We call upon Congress and the Administration to start narrowing the investment gap by increasing USDA support for the research and education components of the "National IPM Initiative." Hence our call for ...

Congress should allocate the new funding to support a broad range of both IPM implementation and research activities:

• $10 million for 20 competitively awarded grants to public-private partnerships, two-thirds targeted to high-value "minor use" crops.
• $6 million for "Microbial Biocontrol of Soil and Plant Pathogens," a new Program Area through the National Research Initiative.
• $5 million for a new SARE Program Area -- "Diversified Farming Systems to Reduce Pest Pressure and Enhance Soil Quality."
• $2 million to accelerate registration of low-risk biopesticides.
• $2 million for new or expanded ARS area-wide programs.

We need to act together, because helping farmers avoid pest problems will help keep American agriculture competitive. It will improve water quality and food safety, and lessen risks to farm-workers and ecosystems. There are other reasons to act as well.

The ability of pests to "learn to live with" once-effective pesticides -- a phenomenon known as genetic resistance -- is a serious and still growing problem.

Weed resistance to herbicides has taken off -- from about a dozen resistant weeds in the United States in the early 1980s to over 300 today. One weed species is resistant to more than 25 herbicides in four different chemical families.

Hundreds of once secondary insect pests have now become well-established primary pests. New strains of blight disease and fungal pathogens are threatening the nation's potato, wheat, and tomato crops. Fungicide use has risen over 40 percent since 1990.

The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 will be implemented over the next 10 years. Within 3 years, EPA is required to review and adjust nearly 3,000 tolerances -- about one-third those now on the books -- to levels consistent with the new law's "reasonable certainty of no harm" standard. This process will lead to some important changes in the way pesticides can be used on many crops, but farmers moving steadily along the IPM continuum will have little to fear from FQPA implementation.

Farmers not yet moving along the IPM continuum will need help and face tougher choices in making the transition away from chemical-dependent systems. Proven, profitable IPM alternatives will make their task easier. Developing and applying such alternatives across the diversity of pest management systems in America is a huge undertaking and will take time. Hence the need to start NOW.