Profitability of farm-scale management strategies against the boll weevil in the tropics: case study from the Colombian Caribbean

Abstract

AbstractDecision making in pest management is a challenging task. While pest dynamics are often quite uncertain, such decisions are often based on tenuous assumptions of certainty (economic injury levels and marginal utility approximations). To overcome such assumptions and adequately consider uncertainty, we apply decision analysis to evaluate management strategies used by farmers in the Colombian Caribbean against the boll weevil (BW). We represent the decision to protect the crop using partial budget analysis. This allows us to capture key properties of BW control strategies, while accounting for uncertainty about pest infestation pressure, control effectiveness and cotton yield and price. Our results indicate that proactive pest management is more efficient than reactive control given the current BW infestation pressure. However, farmers may prefer the reactive strategy, since they have experienced seasons with low infestation pressure where no insecticide applications were required. The proactive strategy, in contrast, requires scheduled pesticide applications in all years. Results show that in seasons with high infestation pressure the expected revenues of the reactive strategy tend to decrease, mainly because more spray applications are required when fields are heavily infested by the weevil. Value of information analysis revealed that uncertainties related to the start of the infestation, loss damage rate and attainable yield have the greatest influence on the decision recommendation for crop protection. Narrowing these key knowledge gaps may offer additional clarity on the performance of the current management strategies and provide guidance for the development of strategies to reduce insecticide use. This is particularly important for the promotion of the proactive strategy, which, under the current infestation pressure, has potential to reduce insecticide use. While economic injury levels can only be applied to responsive measures, our approach of partial budget analysis under uncertainty allows us to assess and compare both responsive and preventive measures in the same methodological framework. This framework can be extended to non-pesticide control measures.