The World Bank is backtracking on earlier commitments to reduce pesticide use in agricultural projects, according to more than 100 environmental, consumer and development organisations from around the world. The bank recently issued a new operational policy which offers only vague guidance to its staff about what kinds of pest management practices should be funded, and says nothing about farmer participation in project design.
In a letter sent to World Bank president James Wolfensohn on November 8, the groups call for the bank to reinstate an earlier policy which gave specific direction to bank staff on how to minimise pesticide use and promoted an ecologically sustainable approach known as integrated pest management (IPM).
IPM controls pest problems through biological controls and other natural means. IPM also emphasises ecological education, with farmers taking the lead in developing locally appropriate pest control methods, often relying on traditional practices in combination with scientific analysis. This ensures that agricultural projects meet the needs of the rural poor they are supposed to help.
In the letter, the NGOs state that as the bank's only current mandatory policy on IPM, this new one and a half page document represents yet another retreat from the bank's first 1985 policy on pest management, which contained an articulate definition of "sound pest management" with 22 operational requirements. Over the past 10 years, the Bank has downgraded this original policy.
In 1988 and 1989, the bank convened a panel of experts to advise on how to upgrade its existing pest management policy with detailed step-by-step guidelines that would enable task managers to implement IPM successfully. The bank adopted the panel's core findings in a 1992 directive but has never published detailed recommendations from the panel's report, despite promising to do so. Moreover, the Bank's 1996 IPM strategy paper showed that implementation of the requirements in the 1992 policy has been virtually nil.
According to a recent internal Operations Evaluation Department study, only about half of the bank's agricultural projects are satisfactorily achieving their goals. Only about a third of agricultural research and extension projects are satisfactorily implemented.
[From Pesticide Action Network North America Updates Service.]