Question

The relationship between economics and integrated pest management.

Answer 1

Methods of control which is the 4 step in IPM has a great relationship with economics
The ways to control are genetic, physical, biological, use of pesticides
1. Genetic: we have to go for recombinant DNA technology to overcome this problem. Incorporating a pesticide resistant gene in the plants genome and growing it might control the pests. But it is not that much easy and very expensive method to do it in a large scale.
2. Use of pesticide : for example the number of pests in the farm might be low but to prevent the damage they might spray the pesticide all over the farm which increases the cost of buying pesticide.
And even the cost of pesticides is higher than the gain or the profit that they gonna get from selling the crops.

3. Biologicals : making the male pest to become sterile, which needs equipments and labor intensive process which again adds on the cost.
Two important terms having the relation between IPM and economics are ETL (economic threshold level) and EIL(economic injury level)

The aim is to prevent pest population to reach a condition or a point where the damage caused by it has equal monetary with cost of control. The point is called EIL

ETL is the level at which control measures should be initiated to control pest population to prevent it to raise above EIL.