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State intervention and farmer creativity: Integrated pest management among rice farmers in Subang, West Java

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Abstract

The 1989 National Integrated Pest Management Program in Indonesia is a case of a breakthrough in national policy to enhance the ecological balance by conserving natural enemies and diminishing the indiscriminate use of pesticides in the protection of food crops. The Program provided training to agricultural officials and farmers to shift their perspectives in pesticide use through “knowledge transmission” rather than the transferal of “technological packages.” This paper examines how farmers, with the novel understanding they had, responded to the persisting top-down policy of the “complete credit packages” from the government rice intensification agencies and the recurrent outbreak of pests in 1990–1992. IPM knowledge and training provided initial understanding of, and the stimulus to discover, unknown phenomena on the basis of which farmers improved their knowledge and learning capacity. Constraints largely came from the inflexibility of the subsidized scheme of inputs and the inadequate explanation and extension services provided to farmers

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Authors
  1. Yunita T. Winarto
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I am a lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Indonesia. I obtained my Magister (MA) degree in Ecological Anthropology from the University of Indonesia in 1984 and MSc degree in Environmental Technology from the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London in 1985. Currently, I am completing my Ph.D thesis at the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the Australian National University. My thesis examines the process and mechanism of farmers' agroecological knowledge construction in the case of Integrated Pest Management Program in West Java. Before working on local people's knowledge I did my research on small scale industries and the management of secondary consequences in dam development projects in Indonesia.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1994 ASAA (Asian Studies Association of Australia) Biennial Conference on:Environment, State and Society in Asia: The Legacy of the Twentieth Century. Murdoch University, Perth, 13–16 July.

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Winarto, Y.T. State intervention and farmer creativity: Integrated pest management among rice farmers in Subang, West Java. Agric Hum Values 12, 47–57 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02218566

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