Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The study is part of the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme. Despite the widespread concerns regarding the use of pesticides in food production and the availability of potentially viable biological pest control strategies in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) systems, the UK cereal crop production remains a bastion of pesticide use. This project aimed to understand further the reasons for this lack of adoption, using the control of summer cereal aphids as a case study. Reasons for this lack of adoption of biocontrol remain a complex interplay of both technical and economic problems. Economists highlight the potential 'path dependency' of an industry to continue to employ a suboptimal technology, caused by past dynamics of adoption resulting in differential private cost structures of each technique. Further, risk aversion on the part of farmers regarding the perceived efficacy of a new technology may also limit up-take. This may be particularly important when IPM rests on portfolios of technologies and when little scientific understanding exists on the effect of portfolio and scale of adoption on overall efficacy. Faced with this, farmers will not adopt a socially superior IPM technology and there exists a clear need for public policy action. This action may take the form of minimising uncertainty through carefully designed research programs, government funding and dissemination of the results of large-scale research studies or direct public support for farm landscape and farm system changes that can promote biocontrol. Socio-economic research has been used to help direct natural science research into the development and evaluation of a combination of 'Habitat Management' and Semiochemical 'Push-Pull' strategies of appropriate scale and complementarity to yield viable, commercially attractive and sustainable alternatives to the use of insecticides in cereal crop agriculture. Scale and...