Affiliation:
1. Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics NC State University Raleigh North Carolina USA
2. Genetic Engineering & Society Center NC State University Raleigh North Carolina USA
3. Department of Statistics NC State University Raleigh North Carolina USA
Abstract
AbstractPesticide resistance poses an increasing challenge for agricultural sustainability. Pesticide susceptibility is a depletable biological resource, but resistance management rarely quantifies marginal, forward‐looking economic costs to users of depletion. To facilitate the development of such costs, we use a generic stochastic bioeconomic model of resistance evolution in a crop pest population, stochastic dynamic programming, and global sensitivity analysis to analyze the “marginal user costs” of resistance. The most impactful parameters are population density dependence and pesticide prices. The least impactful is the fitness cost of resistance, which is noteworthy because of prior emphasis on this parameter in the resistance management literature.
Funder
National Institute of Food and Agriculture