Pest Management

The term pest management was coined by Australian entomologists in the mid 1960s to denote the active management of pests to human levels of tolerance. Pest management operates at scales [Page 2159]from the individual farm to the national environment but has come to define explicit decision-making frameworks applied to prevent, reduce, or remove the impact of pests on production systems, human health, and the environment. Pest management therefore implies a coordinated management strategy with systematized decision making, in contrast to pest control, which refers to the set of actions applied to combat pests in the field. The historical and geographical variation in pest management concerns and regimes, the institutional and legislative frameworks for pest management, and the controversy surrounding pest management techniques are reviewed in this entry.

Pest management emerged historically as industrialization and the mechanization of agriculture prompted a shift from uncoordinated private efforts to control pests, to private firms offering pest control services, to the emergence of public authority oversight. The variation in those species considered pests in different times and places suggests that while a pest can be defined as any organism detrimental to human interests, the production of a pest is the outcome of specific processes. These range from urban health concerns over the plague, rabies, and murine typhus, to mice destroying rice harvests, to badgers spreading bovine tuberculosis on farms, to pigeons as a public nuisance in Trafalgar Square. The history of pest management also demonstrates a broadening of concern from agriculture and public health in metropolitan areas, to environmental impacts of pests such as biodiversity loss. It is perhaps the act of protecting a particular space or desirable entity (such as a residential area, a monoculture crop, or a native ecosystem) that “creates” new pests, through competition for food and habitat between humans and other animals. Research on human-animal conflicts suggests that these are spatial conflicts and challenges to our spatial categorization processes. The classification of a species as a pest is also related to a perceived excess of population numbers (too many wolves and the animal is viewed as a virulent pest, too few and it is a highly valued endangered species). But just as such species are categorized as problems (too many in the wrong place), other people are valuing them (campaigning against badger culls, feeding birds in urban parks, and keeping rats as pets). This demonstrates that “pest” is a subjective and context-dependent classification and not an inherent property.

Important differences emerge in the pest management problems and priorities of developed and developing countries, linked to the resources available to manage pest incursions and the vulnerability of production systems and human populations to the effects of pests. Some developing countries are battling biblical swarms of pests that decimate certain agricultural sectors and adversely affect human health in urban areas. National differences in pest occurrence also have ramifications for agricultural trade, as the classification of national spaces as contaminated with particular pests restricts the legal trade of certain agricultural products.

Pest management is legislated at the regional, national, and international levels. At the international level, the Convention on Biological Diversity stipulates that signatories prevent the impact of nonnative species on native biodiversity, and the World Trade Organization sanitary and phy-tosanitary legislation stipulates that member states inform the international community of the presence of certain notifiable pests. Nationallevel policies operate as stand-alone pieces of species-by-species legislation, as a part of wider environmental or agricultural legislation or as a part of integrated biosecurity legislation. Agencies with pest management responsibilities undertake a variety of coordinating activities, including developing pest management strategies, maintaining inventories of pests and the extent of their incursions, and disseminating best practices.

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