Dr. Joey Goeb is a research associate for Michigan State University's Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics. He currently works in Myanmar for the Food Security Policy Project. He conducted his doctoral research on pesticide safety training programs for smallholder farmers in Zambia.
I had the opportunity to make a small effort towards that
goal with a pesticide training program in Zambia. I found farmers to be a
generally eager audience for pesticide information. But we quickly discovered
that not all information is equally impactful. How the information is delivered
and the information content can affect learning and behavioral outcomes. First
and foremost, trust is everything to farmers and unfortunately the extension
agents in Zambia were stretched too thin (as is the case in many countries) to
allocate much time to pesticides. So, we allowed each village to select a “lead
farmer” to represent them and ultimately train them on pesticide use. These
lead-farmers received a detailed training on pesticide safety, and they were
asked to train the other farmers in their village on the same content. We also
wanted to reinforce the training messages and to expand the number of farmers
we could reach with information. Our first thought was to use cellphone
messages – which have been effective tools in some contexts – but there is low
ownership and inconsistent coverage in our study area. Rather than force the
use of an impractical technology, we pivoted and sent farmers pesticide safety
materials through ‘bush notes’ or informal letter systems. The training program
(farmer-to-farmer training and letters) was generally effective: farmers seemed
to trust the information and we reached ~75% of the targeted farmers.
The second important factor of farmer learning and
behavioral changes was the information content. The first-best option for
information coverage is a full integrated pest management (IPM) program to
communicate all the nuances of pest management and pesticide use. However, budget
and time constraints often factor into training decisions and extension agents
have the difficult task of being generally knowledgeable – and thus able to
address the many questions directed at them – and purposeful and targeted in
their main messages. The three main themes of our program were (i) safe
handling and application of pesticides (e.g., use of personal protective
equipment), (ii) pesticide toxicity and how to identify and interpret toxicity
color labels on pesticide packaging, and (iii) target pests controlled for
several common pesticides (i.e., what each product is labelled to control).
Some messages had larger effects than others. Specifically,
farmers responded strongly to messages (ii) and (iii) but message (i) had
almost no impact. The most striking outcome from our training was that farmers
previously believed that all pesticides were equally poisonous, but after our
training, they could identify low toxicity pesticides (WHO class U) and they chose
those pesticides more often. This is an important result that will have
positive effects on farmer health and reduce environmental costs. However, the
information on personal protective equipment (PPE) use did not change farmer
knowledge or behaviors. We found that farmers already knew about PPE and
reinforcing that knowledge with our training did not have any meaningful
effect.
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