Integrated Pest Management Training in Indonesia: Does the Performance Level of Farmer Training Matter?

Abstract

Indonesia introduced integrated pest management (IPM) technology to farmers through a package of training called the Farmer Field School (FFS). This study aims to analyze the performance of FFS. A descriptive analysis and a simple regression method are used to estimate trends of FFS performance and its impact on rice production and pesticide use. This study uses data of IPM performance drawn from a monitoring and evaluation database and farm-level data drawn from surveys conducted in 1999, 2001, and 2004. The results indicate poor performance of FFS. But there was a slight improvement in the performance resulting from project management efforts. The main factors leading to poor performance of FFS were a low rate of attendance of participants in the training and untimely supplies of training materials. Further results show that the performance of FFS is one of the significant factors that increases the level of rice production and diminishes the level of pesticide use. The low FFS performance is the cause of low rice production and high pesticide use. Key words: integrated pest management; Farmer Field School; indicators of performance, rice production, and pesticide use