The political economy of the Indonesian itegrated pest management program during the 1989-1999 period

Indonesia is considered to have been successful in implementing the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program during 1989-1999. The critical activity of this IPM program was to conduct the participatory training of farmers in IPM practices. Participants were asked to observe and find or discover, by themselves, pests and their natural enemies and then to discuss their findings with one another and freely express their own opinions. Then they were encouraged to derive practical conclusions and implement them. In this training there was no clear-cut distinction between trainers and trainees. Trainers only acted as facilitators. Most of these activities were conducted in the field, where half of the field was planted using techniques that farmers had normally practiced and the other half following the IPM practices being analyzed. Graduates were expected to change their beliefs and practices from exclusive use of pesticides more towards management of the ecosystem, growing healthy crops, and preserving beneficial natural enemies. This chapter aims to understand why this program worked from a political economy perspective. It concludes that among the requisite conditions for this program to work are strong national political support, thorough local research, appropriate mechanisms to implement the policy, and direct benefit to local people. The chapter also observes that when these requisite conditions were not there, the program collapsed.