The political ecology of nontraditional agricultural exports and an IPM project in Jamaica

Since the 1970s Integrated Pest Management (IPM) has been promoted as an alternative to the singular reliance on pesticides to control agricultural pests. IPM involves the combination of chemical and non-chemical pest management practices to minimize pest damage to crops and reduce overall pesticide use. Although IPM has been promoted in both industrialized and Third World countries to reduce environmental and human health problems associated with pesticide use, it has not been widely adopted, particularly among small-scale farmers in the Third World. An important technical constraint to the adoption of IPM is the lack of simple, effective IPM techniques that farmers can easily incorporate into their existing farming systems. However, numerous non-technical constraints discourage farmers from adopting those IPM practices that have already been shown to be effective. Non-technical constraints to the adoption of IPM are the external political-economic forces and location-specific environmental, social and economic factors that may create obstacles to the adoption of IPM practices at the farm level. This thesis will use a political ecology approach to identify and examine the non-technical constraints to the adoption of IPM in the community of Denbigh Kraal in Jamaica.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Geography

Department dc:contributor.department

Geography

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

1996

Author dc:creator

• Patterson, Karen Ann

• Jamaica
• nontraditional agricultural exports
• integrated pest management
• political ecology

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

etd-10022008-063129

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/44974