A leading U-S agricultural scientist is urging the world's farmers, agribusiness firms and farm policy makers to reduce the worldwide use of agricultural chemicals and adopt new, biologically-based strategies in the age-old war on crop pests. VOA's Rob Sivak reports the plea comes in a new book that's NOT available at your local bookstore:

The call for a new battle plan in the global war on bugs comes in Pest Management at the Crossroads, a new book (10/15) published by Consumers Union, a Washington-based public interest research group. Author Charles Benbrook is the former director of the National Research Council's Board on Agriculture. The Board's landmark 1989 study, Alternative Agriculture, stirred controversy by lauding the economic and environmental benefits of non-chemical farming systems.

Mr. Benbrook is now a private consultant on global agriculture issues. He says he and Consumers Union decided to write Pest Management at the Crossroads out of concern that despite all the well-known biological alternatives to chemical pest control -- from bacterial pesticides to bug-eating wasps -- farmers around the world are more dependent than ever on chemical pesticides:

Benbrook: "Despite all the progress with new...biological control technologies from the last thirty years of research, our analysis found clearly that reliance on pesticides continues to rise. The reason that it's rising is that farmers are designing farming systems and managing pests in ways that are pulling the rug out from under natural systems of pest management."

Mr. Benbrook says that on most farms today, overuse of chemical pesticides prevents the establishment of natural pest control systems. Worse, he says, it triggers the development of pesticide resistance among insect pests. Farmers who believe only poisons can protect their crops typically respond by using more pesticide, further undermining the chemicals' usefulness. Mr. Benbrook argues in his new book that farmers need to step off this so-called "pesticide treadmill" and begin moving down what he refers to as the Integrated Pest Management, or I-P-M, continuum. This continuum, he says, moves farmers toward a practice he calls "biointensive IPM:"

Benbrook: "...which are systems where farmers do everything they can to avoid pest problems in the first place, and secondly to use ecological and biological processes to lower pest populations. So you tolerate some pests and you keep a high degree of biological diversity in your system, and let some of these natural checks and balances bear most of the load in managing pests. In those sorts of systems we found that pest management is actually more reliable. You have fewer dramatic losses in yield. The costs are no greater. There is much less highly toxic broad-spectrum pesticide applied, so you have much lower risk to farm workers, the environment and to consumers of the food. "

And contrary to the claims of the agri-chemical industry and its supporters, Charles Benbrook says moving away from chemically-based pest management does not mean sacrificing crop yields -- provided, he adds, that the shift is gradual and balanced. He says a farm on which biointensive I-P-M has been established and is properly managed can be a more productive and sustainable farm than one that relies on chemical toxins:

Benbrook: "When you start to pull out a lot of the very toxic broad-spectrum pesticides from a farming system, you provide the soil micro-organisms and other life in the soil a chance to recover, which improves the fertility of the soil and its ability to take in water. And you find that crop yields start to go up."

The American scientist believes the shift from chemically-reliant pest control toward more knowledge-based I-P-M will not be an easy transition. That's especially true in the United States, he says, where a ten billion dollar a year industry and a vast regulatory apparatus support the continued production, sale and use of chemical pesticides. Mr. Benbrook says the biointensive I-P-M industry in the U-S is still in its infancy. With more farmer, business, and government support for research and education -- like the I-P-M initiative the Clinton Administration launched in 1993 -- Mr. Benbrook predicts Integrated Pest Management will eventually prove its worth in the marketplace:

Benbrook: "We project in the book that about six percent of cropland acreage is now managed under biointensive I-P-M, and we call for that percentage to rise to essentially 100 percent by 2020. And we think it is going to take about 25 years to build that infrastructure, to do the science, to create the manufacturing plants and the engineering processes that are going to lower the costs and increase the effectiveness of these more biologically-oriented approaches to pest management."