ABSTRACT
Integrated pest management (IPM) has been the dominant paradigm for crop protection since the 1960s. In theory, farmers practicing IPM will make decisions about pest management interventions that are economically justified, knowledge-based and that minimize risks to the environment and human health (Parsa et al., 2014). A key feature of IPM is an active monitoring of the crop for pest populations or damage that is weighed
against some pre-established damage threshold above which farm profits would be negatively affected. Farmers are expected to balance the costs of intervention against the potential economic losses if no action were taken (Matteson, 2000). Although elegant in theory, it has been difficult to put IPM into practice on rice farms (Morse and Buhler 1997; Palis, 1998; Bandong et al., 2002) as farmers are pulled between opposing pest management paradigms and vested interests (Matteson, 2000; Matsuno et al., 2006; Spangenberg et al., 2015).
